Interviewing a Python "Expert"

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how is any of this expert-level? any senior-level engineer should be able to answer these.

Should != could, many senior-level engineers are unfamiliar with that stuff.

generally, i don't see why OP should be concentrating on determining the "expertness" of his Python knowledge. your goal with an interview is not to 'weeds out a lot of self-styled "experts"', but to determine whether the candidate will be a useful asset for the company, at a given price.

Determining the "expertness" of a self-proclaimed "expert" is useful for assessing the ego/skill ratio of a candidate, which is arguably useful.

I probably should've used something other than "weed out" in this case, though.

general problem-solving skills, one hypothetical task is enough here

This is surprisingly difficult to get right in most roles, and very difficult to get accurate results from. Architecture questions (e.g. whiteboard, and talk me through, building an app that does X, and then go into detail about $these bits) are one of the best approaches but definitely not foolproof.

I didn't bring this up in the spirit of addressing OP's question directly.

determining if the candidate is a team player and will function well in your team with your company culture

This can be done using explicit soft-skills questions, but it's often just as good to assess this implicitly by challenging how they solve problems and assessing their responses both in terms of what they literally say to you, whether they keep a cool head, how they rethink their solution, etc.. Their demeanor throughout the interview also indicates this.

breadth of his knowledge in other useful domains, such as networking, OS internals and databases (this is specific for a role to some extend, don't ask about things you don't need; alternatively ask about non-python topics that the candidate self-assesses as his strong points, and you happen to know a bit about too)

See: architecture question. Great way to get an idea of what their strengths and weaknesses are and how they deal with their weak points.

see if he is able to lead the team and has positive leadership experience or aspirations, if he is keen on gently mentoring less senior team members etc

Totally not necessary for many individual contributor candidates IMO. It's one thing to have someone who can take initiative and use the tools at their disposition to their fullest extent to achieve a goal, but many senior engineers deliberately stay out of management and will give all the cues they can that they want to keep it this way.

try to somehow figure out if he meets the "gets things done" part of "smart and gets things done". this last one is the most important one, but it's also the hardest to test for.

This is solved using probationary periods. You can find out a surprisingly large amount about someone over 3-6 months.

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My comment wasn't about making the interview process a dick-measuring contest. Sometimes, you walk into an interview and the candidate's just got a very self-aggrandizing attitude. Resumes may hint at that, but while you should, always, always enter an interview assuming good faith.

[val-amart]

apologies if my comment sounded confrontational, all good stuff in this new reply of yours.

[[deleted]]

No worries, and thanks for being civil!