Disney Senior Engineer in Los Angeles: phone screen, a graph BFS coding round and a data pipeline system design on Excalidraw

I interviewed at Walt Disney Los Angeles. I applied via a recruiter who had reached out to me on LinkedIn. She initially scheduled a half hour phone screening, and told me about the job and asked me about my experience, then scheduled me for the next round. All pretty smooth.

The next round was a tech screen and coding assessment, but the interviewer started out with some background-related technical questions from my resume, followed by standard behavioral ones. They asked "Why Disney?" along with a few culture-fit questions where I used the STAR method to keep my responses concise and structured. Then followed with a LC medium level problem. I answered the tech questions well, got the coding problem solved and also discussed some potential improvements. The question was a graph BFS question, quite similar to Binary Tree Level Order Traversal.

After that was the system design interview with a senior engineer which focused on designing a distributed system with a data pipeline. I clarified the initial requirements regarding high-throughput data ingestion, then spent the next 40 minutes walking through my approach while drawing architecture diagrams on Excalidraw for the interviewer.

It was a satisfying interview loop compared to other ones I've done so would definitely encourage anyone keen to join to not be afraid of applying!