Just wrapped up the BMS SWE loop last month for a Senior Software Engineer role on their Digital Accelerator team. Took about 5.5 weeks start to finish. Here's the full sequence:
Week 1: Recruiter screen (30 min). Standard intro call. She covered the team, the BMS mission in digital health, and asked about my background. No tech questions at all. Asked what level I was targeting and why BMS over other pharma.
Week 2: HackerRank OA. Two coding problems, 90 minutes. One medium-difficulty array/hash map problem, one medium-ish graph traversal. Nothing surprising. No SQL or systems-level stuff at this stage.
Week 3: Technical phone screen (45 min). Live coding over Teams. One problem: design a rate limiter, then implement a simplified version in Python. Interviewer was from the platform team. Felt collegial, not adversarial.
Week 4-5: Virtual onsite, four rounds back to back on a Tuesday. Round 1: System design (45 min) Round 2: Another live coding problem (45 min) Round 3: Behavioral/values interview (60 min) Round 4: Cross-functional stakeholder chat (30 min, more of a cultural fit)
Took 10 business days after the onsite to hear back with an offer. They don't do exploding offers but the recruiter said decisions move in 2-3 week windows.
Prep tip: BMS leans heavily into their "patient focus" value, so behavioral prep should include stories about working across functions and showing empathy for end users. They're building a lot of internal digital health tooling, so expect questions about working with non-technical stakeholders.
Overall: process is longer than pure-tech but the people were genuinely warm. This is not a FAANG-style gauntlet.