Screening was with HR, this guys was amazing and the only good thing during this entire interview process. He was very proactive and would almost immediately respond to any questions or scheduling changes.
After the initial screening, 1st round was with hiring manager. Discussion was to understand the role, typical managerial questions like did you ever have to hire/fire, team culture, motivation, tight deadlines, adhoc requests, etc etc. I was very clear with setting expectations with him trying to understand how hands-on this role is. From his questions and responses, it seemed more of team mgmt, solution architecture but little to none hands-on coding.
2nd round - this is what I thought wasn't setup correctly. The person who was supposed to be the panel mentioned to me on the call that he has no idea what the questions should be so he at the last minute called his engineer on the call. Now this engineer is L1 or at most L2 level engineer who is just asking about pandas and spark, to the extent that he is asking syntax for specific spark function e.g. to_csv, repartition, etc etc. These are clearly something that most would just google and code especially for someone who isn't 100% hands-on, but anyway, instead of being condescending I try my best to answer while I keep saying, i can code them but exact syntax like for arguments is something I will have to look but overall I was able to provide enough confidence I had written and can read code/PRs etc. The IC engineer not knowing what the expectation is saw me as not a great L2 engineer and must have voted `no`.
3rd round - Get to this engineer who is on the actual team I'm supposed to be managing. He asks just 2 questions - have you worked on java beans or spring and another about a CICD promotion tool, to which my answer was, as mentioned on my CV I don't have that experience.
After a day or two I get call from the recruiter (again, very nice and professional guy, so no fault of his) to inform me i did not make it.
I kind of had the feeling anyway after 2nd round, but not sure why they wasted my time for a 3rd round.
Overall my opinion is that the hiring goal isn't communicated by the hiring manager (Bocelli) to the other panel members which created a big gap and miscommunication in the process that wasted a lot of peoples time.