I'm also a former interviewer from Google. I typically interview people for L6+ roles.

What's being called "bias" here may simply be "experience" and a fundamentally different understanding of the System Design interview's purpose.

Side note: Systems Design interviews are reserved for "senior" level candidates (L5+). It is a significant inflection point for expectations, as senior-level employees are expected to navigate through and resolve ambiguity. These interviews are not about determining if the candidate can or has solved a particular problem. When a candidate has a particular solution in mind for the presented problem, they better be prepared to explain and justify why.

(Take everything I say with a grain of salt, as there's no guarantee that an arbitrary interviewer you encounter shares the following understandings)

While Google's interviewing process for tech ladders is deliberately designed to minimize any potential interviewer bias in the process (i.e. the interviewer's role is structured to ask, as a starting point, approved questions and take notes --sometimes verbatim-- on the candidate's response for the hiring committee to make a hiring decision, the Systems Design interview is the one type of interview that does and --should-- rely on the interviewer's judgment.

The same Systems Design interview question can be given to candidates across a range of target levels.

What may be frustrating for junior candidates in particular is that unlike leetcode or cracking the coding interview questions, these questions are not intended to be or can be "completely solved." There are no specific "correct" answers. There is no book of solutions to be memorized for such questions. This is deliberate, knowing that people try to memorize answers for interviews. This does not mean a candidate can not, nor should not practice how to show their experience.

The tenets of systems design questions in engineering interviews are to:

0) Foster collaboration. The interview is about understanding how the candidate goes about solving a problem and understanding their experience solving problems (with others).

1) Give the candidate an open-ended question that is not meant to be memorizable, nor exhaustively solvable within the allotted time. This allows an interviewer/hiring committee to observe and judge a candidate's problem solving approach and experience, versus memorization.

2) Give the candidate an opportunity to show their experience -- The question and approach should be sufficiently broad to allow the candidate to surface areas where they have particular depth from their past work experience, and the interviewer to probe/explore those depths.

The interviewer's evaluation of the candidate responses and performance during a systems design interview should include the interviewer's expectations of what a candidate would at least ask or address with the presented problem. Better yet, the interviewer should include what they would expect a candidate for a given target level to address, and further specify what additional things an L+1, L+2, etc would have addressed.

Ultimately systems design interviews are not about a candidate's answers for "What" or "How" to build ______, but surfacing a candidate's judgement skills and understanding of the "Whys" along the way.