He has a bachelors and masters from a Top 3 US program, but neither were related to the work he's doing. In fact, they asked him to start studying ML (with the understanding that he had no prior knowledge) in preparation for his new job.

My gut feeling here is that the 'I don't do what they're testing for in interviews' feeling pervades FAANG management as well as engineers. They probably don't actually see much value in programmer intelligence above a certain bar.

On the fintech side, they are approaching recruiting as they always have and probably won't even schedule an interview if you don't have a recommendation and a top 5 university on your resume.