Went through the Workday frontend SWE loop for a senior role in early 2026. Sharing specifics because the internet had very little on what the frontend-specific parts actually look like.
Quick background: 4 YOE, mostly React, TypeScript, design systems. Applied for a Senior Frontend Engineer role on one of their Workday Extend teams.
How the loop went Recruiter call: 20 minutes, background and timeline. Fast. Technical phone screen: 45 minutes. Started with a vanilla JS question (closures and event delegation), then shifted into a small React component build. No framework setup, just write it in the browser. I had to implement a controlled input with debounced search. Nothing too complex but I fumbled the cleanup in useEffect and had to walk back through it. Onsite (virtual, 4 rounds): Frontend coding: implement a tree component from scratch, add expand/collapse. Felt like something from a Workday-adjacent UI. System design (UI): design a data table with pagination, sorting, and column filtering. They cared a lot about state management and how you'd handle API calls without over-fetching. Behavioral: 4 questions, very structured, all STAR. Two about cross-team collaboration, one about a technical decision you had to defend, one about handling ambiguity. Culture/values: more conversational, felt low-pressure.
What I noticed about how they evaluate frontend
Workday's own product is very enterprise-y and data-dense. They're not building flashy consumer apps. They care about: accessibility, performance in tables with thousands of rows, and how you manage complex state without things falling apart. Mentioning WCAG 2.1 compliance got a visible positive reaction from one interviewer.
What tripped me up
They asked how I'd approach a design system built across 5 different product teams with inconsistent adoption. I had an okay answer but I wish I'd gone deeper on governance models. Know that stuff if you're interviewing for any enterprise frontend role.
Offer: Received, accepted. Base $170k, Pleasanton, hybrid. Senior IC level.