I was given guidelines for the interview, one of them being a system design interview that stated it was a high level tech / architecture I would use for a song recommender app, It stated the interview was not to go too low level or focused on hyper optimizing performance/scalability. It also stated that I should not prepare for more than 30 minutes for it and that it was supposed to be a collaborative exercise. For context, I am a senior software engineer with an upcoming promotion for staff eng in a very big american company that handles millions of users per hour, I do system designs at work on a daily basis, which are assessed by staff and principal engineers. During this particular interview, I was met non-stop with low level/implementation questions, such as: what 3rd party API would you use to fetch songs from? or how would you implement a recommendation engine (for which I explained briefly a machine learning vector technique used for this). I was also met with confusion when talking about AWS, one of the interviewers stating they didn't know AWS. I was not asked once about availability of the system, fault tolerance, observability, isolation or any of the questions expected at a system design interview. Apart from this, the guideline said it was supposed to be a collaborative exercise, just like when you are working together on the job. Several times I asked questions like "What do you think of this solution?" and I was met with "yes, that's fine" answers and no follow up. The interview was supposed to be 45 minutes, and it was cut early. I was surprised by the lack of relevant questions and general lack of architecture knowledge I was met with. And with the questions that were asked, completely against what they had told me in the guidelines for the interview. Overall quite negative interview process, looks like they don't know how to properly assess an engineer.