I was approached by a 3rd party recruiter for Live Nations first senior security architect hire. It was sold as an 80% administrative and strategy and 20% hands-on role. Round 1 was with the hiring manager - ran over twice at their request because we were having a genuinely deep and wide technical conversation. Again, reinforced in this meeting its all about strategy though to support the 2 mid career architects. I was moved forward. The next round was 3 separate interviews with peer(ish in some cases). First interview of the 3 was with a principal systems engineer, within about 14 minutes he had stated I hit all of his check boxes and started selling me on the company. Next interview was a harder read, senior director who also does architecture. Good conversation, a large amount of the time focused on my PhD work in AI/ML, what keeps me from wanting to go into academia afterwards etc. Final interviewer was I believe the SOC manager. They were about 5 minutes late, and I also had an incident where my daughter was screaming outside so I asked for a few minutes (~2) to calm her down and put a show on. Stated it was no issue. The final interviewer felt aloof, but at the same time in my experience a SOC manager doesn't traditionally have a lot of pull over architecture so I didn't try to drive the conversation into more specifics when he asked his only real interview question- the rest was about how the roles interact with eachother. I called the recruiter afterwards and she had mentioned that I was pretty much #1 going into it per feedback, that everything they had received so far was great, etc. I confirmed what I was seeing on my side. So the following day when I received a rejection email for not being technical enough for a strategic role, I did push the recruiter to understand and all that was said is that it was from a different team who made the call that I had never met or spoken to. PS. The same recruiter cold emailed me for the same role 3 weeks later. Turns out the person they did move forward didn't fit.