It was a very senior position but the interview process was completely botched up. I was interviewed by an architect first, who was very cordial but probably didn't have much experience interviewing. We had a very casual chat for 40 minutes during which he barely talked about the last 2-3 years of my 20+ year experience.
I was told that the VP will do another screening round for assessing my leadership experience. Again, we had a very nice, casual, unfocused chat where we barely spoke about leadership. Instead the VP asked about cloud architecture, etc. but it was clear that the VP had no background in cloud at all, just knew some keywords. E.g., EKS/ECS/ASG/cross-region replication was not enough - I had to say the magic words "containers" and "auto-scaling".
It was a disappointing interview as I felt I was being assessed unfairly by people who were looking for keywords. Doubly disappointing that I didn't get any takeaway - I don't know could I have done better.
That said, the interview process itself was very well managed and all the people were cordial. It appears that the people had been trained on interview etiquette, not interview effectiveness. E.g., they seem to have a strict 40-45 minute time limit, which is not enough for an exploratory discussion, especially if we spend it zooming in on one role. Picking between either a longer exploratory discussion or a focused walkthrough would work better for them.
