Got initial screening, 2-hour long open-format test on my FastAPI/Pydantic knowledge and systems design interview. Initial screening went very well, just an exchange of pleasantries. Live coding session was quite challenging due to the broad and open nature of the test, but ultimately I felt like the assessment went well and I got a fair hearing. High expectations, high level of questions, no assumptions of malice or incompetence. The systems design interview is where the interview felt substantially less professional and well-intentioned. They asked about a design of a medical machine learning ETL system. I asked a series of questions about an initial design of a system, but did not feel heard. The main assumption I was trying to clarify was how ingestion would work with a proprietary EHR system. In particular, HiX, which we had agreed to use as the system to discuss and which I have worked with before, has meaningful constraints around data export. I tried several times to clarify how that part should be handled, but the conversation abruptly moved into CDC and downstream architecture. The way this came off to me is as either a substantial miscommunication, or as the interviewer holding certain unstated assumptions in the key challenge of the system that I was supposed to design. I suspect it was not expected to have clarifying questions on engineering around vendor lock-in. There was a second interviewer, but he was fully silent during the whole interview. I would have found it helpful if both interviewers had participated, even briefly.