This was for SWE-III at TCGPlayer. The final interview was extremely misaligned with everything communicated earlier in the process. The interview loop had three parts: recruiter screen, hiring manager screen, and then the technical screen. In the initial recruiter screen, I was told the team was undergoing modernization efforts and was looking for someone with experience in system migrations, Kafka, SQS and SNS, and event-driven pub-sub architecture. They specifically asked about my experience with streams, topics, and message processing. The hiring manager screen was purely behavioral. He reiterated what the recruiter had told me and said the next round would focus on C# and debugging. Based on that, I expected a C# debugging-oriented technical session. After that, I coordinated scheduling with the recruiter for the final interview. In those messages, the recruiter confirmed that the technical interview would be in C#, though they said accommodations could be made if needed. I do not have a C# background at all, so I took that seriously and spent about a week practicing C# drills and debugging style exercises. The recruiter also said the final round would cover coding plus system design or architecture. They also mentioned the interview would be either 60 or 90 minutes, but never clarified which one even after I asked. None of this matched the actual technical interview. In the final technical round, they did not ask anything in C#, did not ask me to debug code, and did not conduct any system design or architecture discussion. Instead, I received one very basic coding problem followed by a series of outdated textbook questions. It felt like new grad interview content from around 2015, such as asking what a Singleton is and what Dependency Injection is. I had prepared to talk about topics like dead letter queues, retries, Kafka partitioning, and distributed system behavior, so the trivia-style questions felt completely disconnected from the role and made me feel unprepared simply because it was not what the position required. I was not asked a single question about my resume or my background. Nothing about migrations, Kafka, SQS, SNS, or distributed backend systems came up at all. The entire process felt misdirected, inconsistent, and ultimately like a waste of preparation time. The hiring manager had mentioned earlier that SWE3 at TCGPlayer could be considered a senior role elsewhere, but the interview content did not reflect that level in any way.