Phone screen with internal recruiter (30 min) > Zoom call with hiring manager (1 hour) > Timed coding challenge on HackerRank (1 hour) > Virtual on-site/panel interviews (4 - 5 hours). The panel interviews were broken down as follows: - Pair Programming 1 (45 minutes) - Pair Programming 2 (45 minutes) - Technical Exercise (45 minutes) - Culture and Values (45 minutes) - Final Q&A (45 minutes) Every part of the interview process went smoothly except the "Technical Exercise" section. It's name is as vague as it's purpose was. It didn't help that this part of the interview was conducted by two engineers who weren't native speakers of English, leading to miscommunications and misunderstandings galore. I tried my level best to interrogate the interviewers to validate my assumptions and get a sense of what aspect of technical knowledge I was being judged on. I started at a high level and started going lower down the application stack but alas, to no avail. I left this part of the interview process with a sense of dread and with good reason. I heard back from the internal recruiter the next day stating that I had impressed everyone except the two gentlemen who conducted the "Technical Exercise" portion of the panel interviews. They walked away with the impression that I had little to no system design experience. Their assessment wouldn't be so ironic had I not held architect and principal engineer positions with highly reputable employers designing some very complex distributed systems. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯