Contract to hire. Easier initial interview. I still had to do a full FTE interview afterwards, but I had the extreme advantage that everyone on the team had already made up their mind. So some of them lobbed softballs, especially the manager.
This is how I did it - though it wasn’t “to hire”. I was part of a wave of 30 or so contractors and I kicked ass during my contract and made some internal allies (most importantly the hiring manager) who pushed to get me on as an FTE. The interview questions and panel were subsequently set up for me to succeed.
Congrats! That is an interesting route to have a months-long "interview". I am assuming contract-to-hire is even more rare than QA-to-software engineer (only know of 2 personally who have done that).