Went through P&G's senior SWE process last fall targeting what they'd roughly call a senior/staff-adjacent role on their supply chain tech platform team. The system design portion was a specific area I had to prepare for and the resources online were thin, so here's what I saw.
Format: The system design round was 45 minutes, done virtually. One interviewer, someone in a senior engineering role themselves. They used a collaborative whiteboard tool (Miro, I think). No specific pre-reading or problem statement sent in advance.
The problem they gave me: Design a real-time inventory tracking system for a global distribution network. Very on-brand for P&G given their logistics scope. They wanted me to handle scale (they dropped numbers like "1M+ warehouse scans per hour"), eventual consistency vs. strong consistency trade-offs, and how you'd handle regional outages.
What they cared about: That I could talk through trade-offs without them asking me to. Don't wait for the prompt. Pick a direction, defend it, acknowledge what you're giving up. Event-driven architecture came up naturally. Kafka-like streaming vs. polling was an explicit conversation. They pushed on failure scenarios more than I expected for a non-cloud-native company.
What they didn't care much about: Perfect API design. Exact database schema. They wanted the big picture and the reasoning, not complete specs.
Tip for senior/staff level candidates: P&G is not a typical tech company. They don't have the same engineering culture as a pure-tech org. So the bar isn't "did you design this the way Google would," it's more "can you communicate clearly, make defensible decisions, and understand the real-world constraints of operating at global consumer goods scale." Honestly that felt fair and grounded.
Asked for feedback after. The recruiter said my trade-off articulation was strong but I could've gone deeper on the data durability question. Good to know.