just finished the full loop at lululemon for a senior SWE role on their digital commerce team (Vancouver HQ, 2026). posting this because when i was researching, there was basically nothing specific out there. here's what actually went down.
recruiter screen (30 min): standard stuff. team background, why lululemon, current comp range. recruiter was friendly, not pushy. asked about my experience with high-traffic e-commerce systems which should have been a hint about what was coming.
tech screen with hiring manager (45 min): half technical, half "tell me about a project" behavioral. they seemed genuinely curious about trade-off decisions i'd made, not just listing my stack. one coding question, basically a warm-up, nothing brutal.
online assessment (72hr take-home): this was the main filter. not a leetcode grind but a real-world scenario: design and implement a service for inventory reservation during flash sales. they gave a skeleton repo, asked me to write production-quality code with tests, and address concurrency. took me about 6 hours spread across the window. they want to see actual engineering judgment, not competitive programming tricks.
onsite (virtual, 4 hours across two days): system design (60 min): more on this in my separate post two coding rounds (45 min each): DSA but applied to problems you'd actually see at a retailer. one around search ranking, one around cart checkout edge cases behavioral round (45 min): heavy STAR format, values-focused. lululemon really cares about this. cross-functional chat (30 min): basically a vibe check with a PM and a TPM
total timeline: applied online, got recruiter reach-out in 3 weeks, then about 5 weeks from first screen to offer decision. not blazing fast but not glacial.
overall the process felt designed by engineers who actually think about what a good engineer looks like. less "did you memorize Cracking the Coding Interview" and more "can you think through a real problem." the take-home was the hardest filter in my experience. if you phone it in there, you're done.