finished my full loop with abbvie about six weeks ago so the details are still pretty fresh. sharing because i couldn't find much useful info when i was prepping.
applied through linkedin for a senior software engineer role on one of their commercial IT teams in north chicago. here's the rough sequence:
week 1: recruiter phone screen (30 min). standard stuff. salary expectations, timeline, why abbvie, are you local or open to relocating. the recruiter was friendly and actually knew the tech stack, which was refreshing.
week 2: technical phone screen with a senior engineer on the team. she asked me about my backend architecture experience, asked me to walk through a design decision from a recent project. no live coding but she pushed on tradeoffs, specifically around service decomposition. also asked if i'd worked in a regulated environment before (FDA is a thing for pharma IT).
week 3-4: nothing (process moves at pharma speed, heads up)
week 4: virtual onsite, 4 rounds over two days: coding round: two leetcode-style problems, medium difficulty. one was graph traversal, one was string manipulation. 45 min each. system design: design a drug interaction alert system. pretty domain-specific but you don't need pharma knowledge; it's really about handling real-time lookups and high-availability design. behavioral: two separate 1-hour sessions, each with two interviewers. lots of STAR format. they really care about collaboration and how you handle ambiguity. team fit: informal chat with the hiring manager. felt like a real conversation, not an eval.
offer came 10 days after onsite. total process from apply to offer: about 7 weeks.
overall: slower than a startup, more structured than i expected. the engineers were genuinely sharp. if you're coming from big tech the pace adjustment is real but the work is interesting.