Recruiter reached out on LI to schedule a brief chat.
Round 1. Intro call with hiring manager.
Round 2. Tech interview (coding and QnA) with their senior engineer.
Round 3. Onsite. A tech presentation followed by several individual breakout sessions of 45m - 1hr each. All but one1:1 interviews went well. One of the interviewers was standoffish from the presentation round itself and in our breakout session they declared wanting to deep dive into my presentation, but asked tangential questions, got hung up on interface details and did not want to "believe" that my solution had worked despite being presented with all the evidence (diagrams, walk-through, control flow logic, etc.). Also, their counter-response to one of my answer was fundamentally incorrect, but I left it at that. As engineers we are trained to value facts and data over beliefs. My attempts at politely managing the narrative were unsuccessful.
The role would have required working closely with this individual, and just by extrapolating my brief interaction, it could've been a stressful, unproductive environment for me.
Unsurprisingly, I got rejected, and they offered a nominal reason why (that could be easily verified in my resume). Recruiting team was great, and rest of the interviewers were pleasantly professional.