Recruiter communication was excellent throughout — fast, responsive, kept me well informed at every stage. Overall a 5-stage process over roughly 6 weeks. After stage 2, following a discussion with the recruiter, the job title changed from Head of Engineering to Director — I hadn't raised any concern about title, so the change was unprompted on my end. I didn't push back on it, but it was a red flag at the time given the scope (40 engineers, full P&L ownership, board-level reporting) clearly read as VP/Head level regardless of label. After I received my rejection, the posting was changed back to Head of Engineering — which raises a real question about what was actually driving that change in the first place. Stage 4 was where the process became disorganized: originally scheduled as a panel, then cancelled, then rescheduled with a different panel composition than originally described, and a full case study was introduced that had not been mentioned anywhere in the process up to that point. The panel also included a team member who would have reported to this role — a genuinely awkward dynamic to be evaluated by someone you'd be managing. I was given only a couple of days to prepare a 90-day assessment and 12-month execution plan covering architecture, operating model, AI-enabled engineering, QA, and org design — a disproportionate ask for that turnaround, especially without visibility into current team structure, existing tooling, or known pain points. Candidates are essentially asked to plan blind on short notice and then defend assumptions live in a 1.5-hour session, despite explicitly caveating throughout that recommendations would need to be validated against real data and context once on the job. Post-interview feedback then cited proposed practices as 'too heavy' for their environment — hard to reconcile with a process that never gave the context needed to calibrate those recommendations in the first place. Worth knowing what you're signing up for going in. Overall totally feels like politically charged environment.