The process began with a 30-minute screening call with a recruiter covering basic software engineering and machine learning questions. The second stage was a 90-minute live coding exercise with two engineers, focused on parsing and validating a spreadsheet using Python and Pandas. While they explicitly stated it was an open-book exercise where I could use any tools or documentation, I was later told that referring to the documentation (which I did once) was one of the main reasons for rejection—a contradictory and frustrating piece of feedback. The interviewers seemed to have a single "correct" solution in mind rather than being open to alternative approaches, despite there being several valid ways to solve the problem

Initial HR round. Standard questions about your experience and background, whats your salary range etc. They asked some light technical questions that seemed to test your fundamental understanding of some concepts