Applied for a software engineer role at L'Oréal (Paris-based team, but interviews were fully remote). Here's the coding side of things because I couldn't find anything specific before I started.
The online assessment (OA)
Delivered via HackerRank. 90 minutes, 2 coding problems. I did this back in February 2026. Problem 1: array manipulation, medium difficulty. Think sliding window or two-pointer. Nothing harder than Leetcode medium. Problem 2: OOP-flavored. Build a class hierarchy for something like a product catalog with inheritance. Less about algorithm cleverness, more about code structure and cleanliness.
Scoring seemed to weight correctness over efficiency. I had a suboptimal solution on the first problem but it passed all test cases and I still moved forward.
The live coding round in the onsite
This was the one I was more nervous about. One interviewer, shared coding environment (not HackerRank, more like a collaborative doc or CodePair equivalent). 50-60 minutes.
The problem I got: given a large catalog of cosmetics products with attributes (brand, category, price, ingredients), design and implement a filtering and sorting system. Start simple, then extend.
So it wasn't a traditional "reverse a linked list" interview. It was more like a software design exercise with code. I wrote actual classes, asked about requirements, made tradeoffs.
Level of difficulty
Honestly: comfortable Leetcode medium, plus solid OOP fundamentals. If you've been grinding Leetcode hard problems for FAANG, this will feel easy. If you're coming from a non-CS background with less algorithm drilling, do practice the standard data structures.
What they seemed to care about: can you write clean code, communicate your thought process, and handle extensions to the problem? Less about whether you can solve a graph problem in 12 minutes.