Went through Best Buy's full loop for a Senior SWE role in their supply chain tech org in February 2026. Posting this because I couldn't find much current info before I went in.
The system design round was 60 minutes with two engineers. The problem they gave me was classic distributed systems territory: design a real-time inventory sync system across thousands of retail store locations and the website. Think eventual consistency, write conflicts when a customer buys something online the same second someone grabs it off a shelf.
What they actually cared about: Starting with clarifying questions. I jumped straight to drawing boxes and they paused me. That's a hint. Tradeoffs, not just solutions. I mentioned Kafka for the event bus and they asked me to compare it to something simpler. Have opinions but be willing to defend them. Failure modes. At about the 40 minute mark they asked 'what happens if the sync service goes down during peak Black Friday traffic.' Have an answer ready. Their actual systems handle this and they want to know you've thought about it.
They didn't ask me to code anything in this round. Pure whiteboarding / virtual miro-style discussion. One interviewer seemed more senior and was probing for depth; the other was quieter but asked good edge-case questions toward the end.
Level-wise: they call it Senior SWE but the scope felt like mid-senior at a FAANG, not staff. The problems aren't harder than a solid L5 system design anywhere else, but the retail context is specific. Brush up on caching strategies for catalog data, CDN patterns, and the basics of order management flows if you want to sound relevant.
Comp for the role I was targeting was somewhere around the $160-180k TC range in Minneapolis HQ, which is reasonable for the market but not FAANG-comparable. YMMV depending on team and negotiation.
Happy to answer questions if you're prepping for their loop.