Overall a very positive process. Very nice and thoughtful people, the priorities for the background of the role just didn't quite match up.
There were mostly cultural and leadership rounds which I did very well on. Where I fell short, however were two technical rounds where I just wasn't a fit. I'll explain.
The very first round was a system design interview. Essentially, they wanted me to talk through an architecture for a kind of problem very specific to the company, deep enough where I was asked to give opinions on a database model. To even entertain the idea of an interview like this, the role assumes at least a fullstack engineering background; maybe it should have ended here.
A final round was what someone at a first glance might assume is "frontend" (my background) but only if you consider the presence of JavaScript to be "frontend." It was an intentionally obtuse series of imperfect data structures and loops that you'd probably tell a junior engineer to send back and start over after reading a few lines. What made this really tough for me was two things:
1) interview prep typically looks like *creating* data structures to solve problems. They said I technically had free reign to modify the code, but it wasn't totally clear how far I could or should go. I'd take very different approaches as a senior IC versus a manager in coming to a solution.
2) the format was fixing the output of a test run in NodeJS, where I didn't have access to a JavaScript debugger—I was forced to use the console alone, like a caveman. On the hotseat, no less. I got the solution in the end, but it wasn't a slam dunk. Access to a debugger would really have sped things up a lot for me personally.
All in all, nothing about any exercise had anything at all to do with the browser, where they said they had a deficit of expertise on the team and were looking to correct. With this process, it would have been possible to get an offer without being able to understand how to use CSS to make text look red. Too bad.
All that being said, each and every single person in even the tougher interviews was super helpful and excellent in how they attempted to nudge me in the right direction. In my personal opinion, I just think the format didn't align with what I could bring to the table. Maybe another candidate is a better fit, but overall I really appreciated everybody's care and patience in what might be an imperfect spread of challenges for me personally.