How to get hired
Know which tier you are applying to
UI Developer and Web Developer posts, common at agencies, SEO firms, small businesses and staffing firms, mostly want HTML, CSS, Bootstrap or Tailwind, jQuery or light JavaScript, and turning Figma designs into responsive pages. They hire freshers quickly and pay modestly. Frontend Engineer and Frontend Developer posts at product companies, SaaS firms, consumer brands with digital teams, and GCCs want React or Angular with TypeScript, state management, testing and performance work. They pay far more and interview much harder.
Plenty of people start in the first tier. The trick is not to stay there for more than a year or two: rebuild your agency pages as components, learn TypeScript and testing, and apply upward.
The machine coding round
This is the round that defines frontend hiring at Indian product companies. You get 60 to 120 minutes to build a working UI component from scratch, usually without a component library, while the interviewer watches or reviews it afterwards. Common prompts:
- An autocomplete search box with debounced API calls and keyboard navigation
- A paginated or infinitely scrolling list
- A star rating, accordion, tabs or modal, done accessibly
- A to-do or Kanban board with filters and local persistence
- A nested comment thread, or a file explorer tree
They judge: does it work, is state kept in the right place, are components small and reusable, are loading, error and empty states handled, and can you explain your choices. Practise by building ten of these against a timer. Interviewers can tell a memorised solution from one you understand by asking for one small change.
The rest of the loop
- A JavaScript fundamentals round (closures, the event loop, "this", promises); practise explaining each one aloud
- React: how rendering and re-rendering work, keys in lists, useEffect pitfalls, memoisation (useMemo, useCallback, React.memo) and when it is wasted, context vs a state library
- Angular: modules vs standalone components, change detection, RxJS operators (switchMap vs mergeMap), dependency injection
- CSS: the box model, specificity, flexbox vs grid, positioning, and making a layout work on a 360-pixel phone screen
- Browser and performance: what blocks rendering, lazy loading, bundle size, and Core Web Vitals (LCP, INP, CLS)
- For senior roles, frontend system design: how you would build a news feed, a chat UI or a design system shared across teams
Accessibility is a differentiator
Very few Indian candidates can talk about accessibility, and GCCs serving US and European customers have to meet WCAG. Know semantic HTML, labels, keyboard focus, colour contrast and ARIA basics. One accessible component in your portfolio, with a note on how you tested it with a screen reader, sets you apart.
Who hires
Services firms (HCLTech, Deloitte) for client portals, often Angular. Product companies and startups, usually React. Consumer brands that run their own web and app teams, Havells among them, and fintechs such as Paytm. Agencies and staffing firms dominate the UI Developer end.
What the work is like
Frontend developers sit between designers, backend developers and product managers, so a lot of the job is conversation: pushing back on a design that will not work on small phones, agreeing an API shape, fixing a layout that breaks only in one browser. Releases are visible: when something breaks, everyone sees it.
Titles climb from Frontend Developer to Senior Frontend Engineer, then Staff or Lead, then frontend architect or engineering manager. Some move sideways into UI/UX design (see the UI/UX guide) or into full stack.