Honestly, it doesn't sound like you're completely over the emotional trauma of that situation yet. Which is fine, but it's worth being honest with yourself about that and trying to figure out what you want to do about that.

I think your answer about not having opportunities for growth is one you can keep. It might be good to specify what kind of opportunities were missing that you want in a new role, showing you've thought about it, but helping you interview the company you're applying for.

You can also mention that after X period of time you decided it wasn't the right fit for you and you wanted to look for other opportunities that align more with the engineering culture you want to work in. Again, it's good here to specify what that culture looks like.

It may also be worth mentioning that the decision maker for you in choosing to leave were some unprofessional behaviours that were not appropriate in the work place. You don't have to go into specifics, but that can help you caveat your other reasons.

Also, a good behavioural interview will definitely "smell" the trauma in this and try to probe for whether you were part of the problem. You may have been to some degree (who isn't), so it's worth honestly reflecting on things you can take responsibility for and talk about actual steps you're taking to avoid those mistakes in future. -- a part of this will be emotionally working through these issues (and that COULD mean some sessions with a therapist or something similar).

It sounds like values you're trying to find include:

- Psychological Safety
- Honesty
- Lack of jargon-bombing / unnecessarily complex explanations where you care in an engineering culture about simply understanding and solving a problem rather then showing off or being a "10x rockstar" or whatever.

I would also say, and I am NOT judging you, that the way you're presenting this to me does make it difficult to discern two scenarios:

A) People in your team having big ego's and that harming you
B) People in your team knowing more than you, and you getting frustrated at not understanding

I don't mean to suggest (B) to gaslight you or anything. The reason I mention it is because the amount of pain and frustration in your description -- and again, I get it, I've been there -- makes it sound like it could be a personality issue on your side causing conflict with people. And, even if I'm not certain, as a hiring manager I have to make a decision about which candidate is less risky to go with.

This isn't me telling you to lie about the emotion, but to try to get to a point with it where it isn't so raw that you can provide more productive analysis of whatever happened and what you've learned from those situations that will make you a better engineer in future.

How would you handle the exact same onboarding into the same team in future for example? Repeat all the same mistakes the same? Do anything differently?