Tale as old as time: Company outsources all it's development. Eventually learns that the cost of outsourcing not only costs them 10x as much, but they have no control over the products nor do they have talent that cares about the codebases. Now they want to bring things in-house but have no idea how to do that. So they farm out that process as well! They still want to maintain some control so they are looking for a "perfect fit" situation (someone to wear all the hats) and you'll have to jump through a few hoops just to talk to anyone who actually knows a tad about anything technical. From canned interview questions to being lead to the perfect answer by some director who has no clue who he's really looking for. They have you, on a high level, design a scalable API for something they already half-built, then the person who has no idea how to build it asks you about it and tries to lead you to the way they choose to half-build it. Their way was the right way and whatever you choose is the wrong way; even if you have the reasoning why some things work out as an advantage. Remember, the person talking to you has no idea how it really works but knows all the buzz words they used to get themselves there. Then a coding test where you can't copy/paste from any resource (type it all by hand), where it must be done in multiple languages, and no one cares how you do it (you do it on your own time, no one interacts with you during it) and every step is an indication that you're cheating in some way... Kind-of a waste of time all-in-all however I was more curious where it was all going in the end. Overall: 5 hours of time (3 in interviews, 2 in prep and coding challenges), so not nearly as bad as Meta or Google.
But still... for a tiny company that has no idea how to do tech like the big boys: Get over yourselves American Logistics!