Applied via college/university.

Recruiter reached out with a coding exam, which was pretty easy to solve.

Next, a phone screen was scheduled, but I did not make it past this stage. The phone screen consisted of some resume questions and a programming question based on CoderPad, so the interviewer could watch you write your solution. You were also free to implement your solution on an IDE first.

It does seem that they want people who can think of a good solution and code pretty quickly. If you use API docs, they expect you to use them properly by making the correct calls appropriate for what you want to do and that provide the best theoretical performance.

The technical questions themselves weren't too bad, but they set the bar at a pretty high level for the solution that you deliver. In this case, simply being able to deliver a workable solution isn't enough.

In implementing the solution, the interviewer asked how I could optimize it further. It was a unique case.