Design & User Experience Topics
User experience design, frontend architecture, and design systems. Includes UX principles, accessibility, and design documentation.
Technical Depth & Areas of Specialization
Every strong candidate has one or more areas of technical depth that go beyond generalist knowledge. Discuss the area(s) where you have the most depth: how you identify it (a subsystem, technology, domain, or class of problem you gravitate toward), a concrete project or accomplishment that demonstrates that depth, how you actively keep that expertise current (reading, communities, side projects, postmortems), and how that depth changes the way you make trade-offs or collaborate with generalists on your team. Areas of specialization are highly individual and role-dependent (examples span distributed systems reliability, accessibility and design systems, security architecture, data pipelines, performance optimization, mobile platforms) - the interviewer should probe the candidate's own stated specialization rather than assume a fixed domain.
Rapid Problem Definition
Evaluates the ability to quickly synthesize an ambiguous brief into a clear problem statement, scope, constraints, and measurable success criteria. Assesses timeboxed prioritization, clarifying assumptions, identification of edge cases and risks, formulation of testable hypotheses, and succinct stakeholder alignment under pressure.
Company Product and Design Knowledge
Demonstrate a well researched understanding of the company, its major products, target users, market position, and core business model, combined with familiarity with the company design philosophy and visible product design patterns. Prepare to speak about flagship products and features, typical user demographics and needs, the engineering or product challenges the company faces, and how those constraints shape product and design decisions. For design roles, be ready to articulate what you admire about the company design aesthetic, specific patterns or interactions you observe, accessibility and usability trade offs, and how your own design sensibilities or past work align with and could contribute to that aesthetic. For non design roles, emphasize product priorities, technical or operational challenges, and how your skills would help advance those products. Cite concrete examples such as a recent feature, a product workflow, a known engineering challenge, or public design documentation to show you have done focused research.
Artificial Intelligence Assisted Workflows
Covers how professionals use AI tools to accelerate their day to day work: selecting appropriate use cases for AI assistance, iterating on prompts and instructions to get useful output, generating drafts, variations, or code and evaluating them critically, integrating AI generated output into one's own deliverables without introducing errors, validating outputs against requirements, quality standards, or user needs, and recognizing ethical concerns such as bias, over reliance, and misattributed authorship when applying AI in professional work.