Just finished the OA and two coding rounds for a software engineer role at PepsiCo (digital/ecommerce org). Here's the full breakdown, because when I searched for this there was basically nothing current.
Online Assessment: Delivered via HackerRank. Two problems, 45-minute window once you start (but 72 hours to choose when to start). No webcam proctoring during the coding. I got: A medium-difficulty sliding window problem (substring with constraints) A medium tree traversal problem (level-order with a twist)
Both had multiple visible test cases and some hidden ones. I passed all visible and failed one hidden on problem 2 (probably an edge case with empty tree). Still advanced. So they're not requiring 100%.
Tips: Python is fine, I used it. Read the constraints first. The problems aren't hard if you've done a few weeks of LeetCode mediums, but they're not trivial either. Don't skip edge cases.
Coding Round 1 (during onsite, 50 min): Started with a warm-up easy (reverse a linked list variant, done in maybe 10 min), then moved into a medium graph problem: find the minimum cost path between nodes given some constraints. I used BFS with a priority queue. Interviewer was engaged, asked me to talk through complexity. Good interactive energy.
Coding Round 2 (second onsite day, 50 min): Medium-hard. Dynamic programming problem: partition array to maximize some function. I brute-forced it first, talked through why it's slow, then optimized with memoization. They seemed happy with seeing the progression of thought even though I didn't get to the full optimal solution in time.
Overall difficulty: Solid LeetCode medium, occasionally touching medium-hard. Not FAANG-hard. You don't need to crush hard problems to pass. Thinking out loud and reasoning about complexity matters a lot.
One thing: the interviewers consistently asked "what would you test here" or "what edge cases worry you." This caught a few people I know off guard. If you're applying for SWE and not QA, still prep for that question.