Went through this in early 2026 for a mid-senior SWE role on their digital commerce team. Total timeline was about 7 weeks, which felt slow but they warned me upfront. Here's the breakdown.
Recruiter screen (week 1): ~30 minutes, standard resume walkthrough. She asked about my interest in CPG/beauty specifically, which caught me off guard. They do care that you're not just treating ELC as a random tech job. Mentioned the team size, the stack (React, Node, some Java services on the backend), and gave me a timeline.
Online assessment (week 2): Two LeetCode-style problems on HackerRank, 90-minute window. I got a medium graph problem and a medium-hard dynamic programming question. Nothing obscure. Standard fare if you've been prepping.
Technical phone screen (week 3): 45 minutes with a senior eng. First 15 were general: tell me about a system you built, how did you handle scale. Then a live coding exercise in CoderPad, another medium-difficulty problem. He was conversational, not adversarial. Asked about tradeoffs, not just the solution.
Onsite / virtual final (weeks 5-6): Four rounds back to back. System design (see my other post for details), two more coding rounds, and a behavioral round. The coding rounds were solid medium difficulty. Nothing that would wreck you if you'd done 60-70 LeetCode problems. One round had a debugging component, which was a nice change.
Offer stage: They moved quickly after the onsite, heard back in 4 days. The comp structure was interesting since there's no RSU cliff like you'd get at a pure tech company. Base was competitive for a CPG company, bonus-heavy.
Overall: ELC is not FAANG. The bar is real but it's not "design a distributed database from scratch" territory. The team cared a lot about communication and collaboration, maybe more than any loop I've done at a software-first company. If you're pivoting from pure tech into CPG/beauty-adjacent, come ready to explain why. They actually read your cover letter.