Design leadership I met with spoke mostly in buzzwords and generalities. A lot of hot air with very little ability to engage in specifics - was not impressed at all. Lots of competency red flags around craft and process understanding. Leadership seemed to have little previous experience working at strong tech companies.
They put me through TEN separate interview sessions which is an insulting waste of time and clearly an incompetently designed interview process. I had to give the exact same case study presentation THREE SEPARATE TIMES. And all for me to not get an offer at the end which as far as I understand was based on one of the ten (with a PM Leader) not being positive feedback.
In that one interview I mentioned, the interviewer was unfriendly from minute 1 in a way that made the interview uncomfortable, and asked only a few overly broad questions. Ex: “what is your design process”. At the Sr level a reasonable answer would be “it depends”, followed by a specific example of a process, and then examples of variations depending on different circumstances. After I answered PM basically said he didn't like my answer and wanted me to have a single process regardless of context, which makes no sense for anyone who knows what they're talking about. It's especially absurd because design leadership actually said ahead of time that they thought "what is your design process" was a pointless question, so clearly they didn't even all align on what they should be looking for in interviews.
The product interface looked inexcusably bad for the size of the design team. Approach to design systems was lacking and they take a waterfall approach more than an agile one. Too bad because better UX execution could be a huge differentiator for this business.
I ended up with other significantly higher offers than they could have given anyways, including one from Bloomberg.