Walgreens · Primly Community

Walgreens software engineer interview process, full loop breakdown from a recent hire

frontend_fran · 5 replies

Just finished and accepted an offer from Walgreens (tech division, Deerfield HQ). Took about 6 weeks start to finish. Sharing because I couldn't find much detail when I was prepping.

The loop had 4 stages:

1. Recruiter screen (30 min) Pretty standard. They asked about background, why Walgreens specifically (have something ready, they do care), and gave a rough timeline. My recruiter was responsive, which honestly already stood out.

2. Hiring manager intro (45 min) Half conversation, half light technical. She asked about my most recent architecture decisions and what tradeoffs I made. No live coding. More of a culture/fit signal call. They want to see you can talk about systems without reading from a script.

3. Technical round (90 min, video call) This is where the real interview starts. Two back-to-back coding problems plus one design question. The coding was medium Leetcode difficulty, nothing brutal. One array/string manipulation, one graph traversal. They gave me a shared coding environment (not HackerRank, just a collaborative editor). They were pretty relaxed about talking through your approach before coding.

The design question was for a notification system, which honestly felt prescient given they're building a lot of customer-facing tooling for pharmacy alerts. Senior candidates got more pushback on scale assumptions.

4. Final panel (3 hours total, 4 interviewers) Behavioral + one more system design + a deeper dive into past projects. The behavioral questions were standard STAR method stuff: conflict on a team, a time you delivered under pressure, how you handle ambiguity. The system design was a distributed cache problem.

Total: 4 rounds. No take-home. No Hackerrank OA before the phone screen (my recruiter said some roles get one, mine didn't).

I was interviewing for a mid-senior SWE role. Base landed somewhere in the 130-140 range depending on your starting point in their band. Bonus exists but felt modest for this level. Full remote was not an option for this team, they wanted 2-3 days in Deerfield.

Happy to answer questions. Prep-wise I just did Leetcode mediums and reviewed basic distributed systems concepts. Nothing exotic.

5 replies

bootcamp_bri

thank you for this. was the technical round interviewer from the same team you'd be joining or was it a panel from a different eng org? asking because i've heard walgreens has a separate "tech talent" team that handles the loop for some positions.

firsttime_mgr

it was a mix. one interviewer from the team i'd be joining, one from an adjacent backend team. the design question was asked by someone in platform. so yeah it's not all from one team. the recruiter can tell you if you ask directly.

laidoff_lena

The 130-140 band for mid-senior SWE at a pharmacy retailer doesn't surprise me but it's lower than I'd hope for Chicagoland. Did you negotiate or was that already the top of the band?

sec_sasha

I did negotiate, got about 8k added. Initial offer was 125. The recruiter said the band went to ~145 for this level but there wasn't flexibility past that. Walgreens is not a FAANG comp situation, but the stability factor was real for me after two startups.

sre_sol

Did they ask anything about on-call expectations or SLAs? I've seen some listings that look more SRE-adjacent even when titled SWE.