Initial phone screen, "life story" interview, and a "pair programming" exercise that wasn't actually pair programming, but rather one-sided SQL writing. The SQL itself wasn't difficult, just not relevant to the actual work a senior data engineer should be doing.

The "pair programming" experience was a joke. I thought it was going to be collaborative, but instead, it was a one-sided coding exercise. It was just me writing SQL while my interviewer remained silent.

There was zero collaboration or back-and-forth.

Additionally, they posed a "brain teaser" type question involving SQL, the kind you'd never encounter in a real-world scenario. The answer required joining a dimension table to a sales table using a Cartesian join.

Truly, that's precisely what you want your engineers to do: cross-join millions of dimension records to billions of fact records. Brilliant.