The interview process was very warm at first. The recruiter reached out, was fairly sharp and upbeat. I went through a tech screen and then an onsite was scheduled. I noticed that the onsite invitation showed the title "Principal Infrastructure Engineer". I contacted the recruiter, and was slightly concerned, because there were other JDs on the site with that title that were operations focused. He told me that it was just a "placeholder". I talked to a few managers first, and we discussed Java development. It came across like the behavioral parts of an interview. Then the technical pieces started and I was being asked operations questions. There wasn't a single coding question. (The fire alarm went off in the middle of one of the interviews. Coincidentally, the interviewer asked me a question about Apache HTTP Server that I actually knew. He actually didn't have the correct answer, and I urged him to look it up during the interview. He did, and politely apologized). I kept politely reminding each interviewer that I was interviewing for a Software Development position. The last interviewer was really the cherry on top of a very peculiar interviewing experience. The interviewer was someone who had several weeks before, interviewed at the company I was currently working for. Unfortunately he wasn't selected for the position (although I lobbied for him several times. ) Professionally speaking, if in the same position, I would (and have) recused myself from the interview. It put me in a tough spot, because I can't exactly complain about it without putting his job in jeopardy. Like the previous interviewers, he started asking me systems admin/operations questions. At this point I was actually pretty furious, but I politely went through the remainder of the interview. The recruiter feedback (I am literally copying this from the email) was "It seems like you should have been interviewing for a Software Engineering position, but we don't have anything like that available right now."