I had an initial chat with a hiring manager and a recruiter. From those conversations, it sounded like it would be a great fit and that they would value me for all my experience. They described work that sounded like it would capitalize on my background while still allowing me room for growth. The recruiter acknowledged that I should be hired into a higher level role. (I am a woman mathematician with a significant amount of experience working on hard problems. I struggle with people not stereotyping into inappropriate roles and inappropriate levels, so these initial conversations were promising.)
I had one interview with a Research Scientist in London and two interviews with Software Engineers in Mountain View.
The interview with the Research Scientist was interesting. They asked good questions that gauged problem solving and creativity. We had a good conversation. I felt like he was respectful, collaborative, and appreciated my background.
Both of the interviews with the Software Engineers were disappointing. They asked questions appropriate for someone with less experience and were focused more on implementation rather than research. That would have been fine if they asked language-agnostic, algorithmic questions. But, the questions were obviously designed for python and were mostly testing off-hand knowledge of specific built-in text parsing functions. It was the sort of thing that anyone could have done easily in 5 minutes at their desk with the ability to look things up, but python is not my primary language and I don't do much text parsing.
Both of them were very unwelcoming. Their comments made it clear that they had very rigid ideas about career paths and had a very different idea about the position for which I was being interviewed than the hiring manager. (I got the impression that both of them had pure CS backgrounds and no experience with research. It very much felt like they were gatekeeping.)