It was a very senior position, but the interview process was completely botched.

I was interviewed by an architect first, who was cordial but probably didn't have much interviewing experience. We had a 40-minute casual chat during which they barely touched upon the last 2-3 years of my 20+ years of experience.

I was told the VP would conduct another screening round to assess my leadership experience. Again, we had a nice, casual, unfocused chat where we barely spoke about leadership. Instead, the VP asked about cloud architecture, etc., but it was clear they had no background in cloud, just knew some keywords. For example, EKS/ECS/ASG/cross-region replication wasn't 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 looking for keywords. It was doubly disappointing that I gained no takeaway – I don't know if I could have done better.

That said, the interview process itself was well managed, and all the people were cordial. It appears they were trained on interview etiquette, not interview effectiveness.

For example, they seemed to have a strict 40-45 minute time limit, which is not enough for an exploratory discussion, especially if it's spent zooming in on one role. Picking either a longer exploratory discussion or a focused walkthrough would work better for them.

Mostly based on my (recent) experience, but they like to hear the terms:

• Platform
• GenAI
• Auto-Scaling
• Fault-tolerant
• Cloud Migration
• Modernization