I first spoke with the hiring manager, and we went through my resume and projects in detail. He asked me several system design questions to understand how I think about architecture, tradeoffs, scalability, and reliability, and I explained my approach and reasoning as I worked through them. He also described the team, what they own, how they collaborate day to day, and what the role would look like in practice, including the kinds of problems I would be expected to solve and the skills they value most.