Went through the PepsiCo SWE loop earlier this year for a mid-level role on their ecommerce/digital tech team. Sharing the full breakdown because I couldn't find much when I was prepping.
Total timeline was about 5 weeks from first recruiter call to offer.
Stage 1: Recruiter phone screen (30 min) Basic background questions. Why PepsiCo, walk me through your experience, what kind of team are you looking for. No technical questions here. Recruiter was friendly and honest about the pace of hiring. She mentioned the team was relatively new and growing fast.
Stage 2: Online assessment (72-hour window) Two LeetCode-style coding problems via HackerRank. I got a medium array/hash problem and a medium string manipulation problem. Both had decent test coverage and hidden test cases. 45-minute time limit. No proctoring, self-paced within the window.
Stage 3: Technical phone screen (45 min) One coding problem (medium DP, trees) and then maybe 15 minutes of system design at a high level. Felt more like a conversation than a whiteboard grind. Engineer on the call was in their digital transformation org, not the core legacy IT side.
Stage 4: Virtual onsite (4 hours split across 2 days) Two coding rounds (medium difficulty, mostly array/tree/graph problems) One system design round (more depth here, see my other post on this) One behavioral/values round with an HR business partner
They use a structured scorecard. Multiple interviewers submit independent scores before any debrief. This matters because one bad interaction doesn't sink you as easily as it might elsewhere.
Overall verdict: the process felt professional and organized. Not FAANG-intensity, but not sloppy either. The bar felt roughly consistent with a well-run mid-sized tech org. PepsiCo's digital team is genuinely trying to modernize and they're competing for real engineers now, not just SAP admins.