Maya R.

9.4

maya.r@gmail.com · Interviewed 5/24/2026 · Senior React Engineer

AI verdict

Strong fit9.4/10

Strong React fundamentals and unusually clear thinking about design system boundaries. Recruiter should advance.

Transcript

13 messages

Hey Maya — thanks for taking the time. I'm ConsultHire, the AI recruiter for the Senior React Engineer role. Ready when you are.

Ready! Hi 👋

Great. To kick off — tell me about a React codebase you've owned where you made a meaningful architectural decision. What did you change and why?

At my last role we had a Redux app that had grown into about 40 slices. State was hard to reason about and onboarding new engineers took weeks. I led a migration to Zustand + React Query — broke state into colocated stores per feature, moved all server state to React Query. Bundle dropped ~22%, and new engineers were productive in days.

Nice. What did you lose by moving away from Redux?

Time-travel debugging was the biggest one. Redux DevTools are unmatched for stepping through complex flows. We replaced ~60% of that with structured logging in dev + a small inspector hook. The other 40% we just… lost. Worth it on net but it wasn't free.

Switching gears — design systems. What's the right boundary between a component library and a product UI?

If it has business logic, it belongs in the product. If it has any visual opinion, it belongs in the library. The library should be unopinionated about layout but opinionated about every other axis — color, spacing, motion, accessibility.

Let's talk a hypothetical. A junior on your team keeps shipping CSS that breaks the system. How do you coach without crushing them?

First — assume the system is at fault. Nine times out of ten the rules aren't discoverable enough. I'd pair with them on the next PR, narrate my thought process, then write down what I noticed for the team. Public coaching beats private criticism.

Last one — tell me about a time you were the loudest voice in the room, and you turned out to be wrong.

When we evaluated tRPC vs GraphQL I lobbied hard for tRPC. We adopted it, then realized our mobile clients needed schema introspection we just didn't have. I drove the migration back to GraphQL six months later. I learned to ask 'who's not in this room' before pushing hard.

Maya — really enjoyed this. Recruiter will follow up shortly with next steps. Have a great rest of your day.

Interview complete · completed

Like what you see?

Paste your own JD and ConsultHire will run interviews like this for every applicant, automatically.