Went through L'Oréal's full software engineer interview process earlier this year for a role on their CDO (Chief Digital Officer) org. Sharing the breakdown because there's basically nothing on this online and I wasted a week trying to find info.
Total timeline: applied end of January, offer in hand March 3. About 5.5 weeks, which is faster than I expected from a large CPG.
Round 1: Recruiter screen (30 min) Standard background questions. Why L'Oréal. Comp expectations. They do ask early so have a number ready. Recruiter was well-prepared and clearly knew the tech org.
Round 2: Technical phone screen (1 hour) With a senior engineer. One medium-difficulty coding problem on a shared editor (HackerRank-style, but live not async). Mine was a string manipulation/sliding window problem. Nothing wild. Also about 20 min of system design-lite: "walk me through how you'd build a product recommendation feature."
Round 3: Technical onsite (3.5 hours, done over two days remote) Two coding interviews. One was a graph traversal, one was more OOP design-heavy (model a shopping cart, then extend it) One system design: design a scalable image transformation service for beauty product photos One behavioral panel with two interviewers
Round 4: Hiring manager conversation (45 min) More of a vibe check and org context. They describe the team, you ask questions, they're basically sold if you got here.
Difficulty felt like mid-tier tech company, not FAANG. Leetcode medium comfortable should cover the coding. System design was more product-flavored than infra-heavy, which makes sense given it's CPG not a cloud infra company.
Happy to answer questions about any specific round.