My J.P. Morgan London Interview Experience — Pair Programming Under Pressure

Earlier this year, I went through the interview process for a Front End Engineer role with J.P. Morgan's Personal Investing team in London. I got fairly deep into the process before being turned down, and the experience taught me something I hadn't fully appreciated before: the gap between knowing how to build something and building it fluently while someone watches you think.

The format. After an initial recruiter screening, the process moved to a first-round interview covering my background, motivation for the role, core frontend fundamentals, accessibility, and topics like stakeholder management and CI/CD. That went well, and I progressed to a pair-programming round — around 90 minutes, working through live coding tasks in JavaScript and React with two engineers.

Where it went sideways. The pair-programming round was the deciding stage. I was slower than the interview expected me to be, needed some guidance to get unstuck, and didn't fully finish the styling on one of the tasks — the interviewers had to step in a few times. Looking back, the feedback was really about coding fluency and pace under live pressure, not about whether I understood the underlying concepts.

The outcome. I was rejected after the pair-programming round, before reaching the final behavioral/team-fit interview that had already been scheduled.

What I took from it. This one stuck with me more than most rejections, because it wasn't a knowledge gap — it was a performance-under-pressure gap. I know how to solve these problems when I have time to think. I'm working on closing the gap between that and solving them fluently, out loud, on a clock, while being watched.