Applied online, fast return afterwards. After the initial conversation with the Head of People & Culture, I was invited to the office to meet and to have the second round with the VP of Engineering. Then came the next round with a Team Lead and a Software Engineer, which was mainly a system design interview. Since the beginning of our talk, we mutually agreed that the role doesn't need any hands-on involvement, it's purely people management and process governance. Having technical background is a plus but it's not going to be needed every day. During the system design, I tried to give as much relevant context as possible while trying to keep the solution simple but useful. At the end, I received a feedback saying they liked how I explained the concepts, gathered requirements, kept a list of assumptions, spotted gaps in my design along the way and self corrected, built a functional API and successfully iterated on it. And the reason why they've decided to not move forward is that I didn't deliver a working data model. Which was all the time on the screen and which was something I kept iterating over. "Working" part might be the operative word, I don't know. I always thought the system design round is about trade-offs rather than correctly labeling each and every column in a database table. Side note, one of the two interviewers didn't say anything at all for the full duration of the session, other than "hi, i'm this and i do that" at the beginning and "thanks, bye" at the end. My counter feedback was along the lines of when purely technical people assess non-technical positions, they approach it like they have a hammer at their hands and see everything as nails, and expect the other party to know as much as they do and then some.