The interview process felt unnecessarily adversarial and high-pressure for a senior engineering role. The technical evaluation focused heavily on live performance under stress rather than creating a collaborative environment to understand engineering experience, systems thinking, or problem-solving approach. I was initially told the interview would be more conversational and focused on background and experience, but the process ended up including trivia-style questioning, an unexpected ERD/system design exercise without proper tooling, and 30 minutes of live coding involving async TypeScript functions under time pressure. While I understand the importance of technical evaluations, I personally found the process more focused on interview performance than on evaluating broader senior engineering qualities such as architecture decisions, collaboration, product thinking, ownership, or real-world delivery experience.