I don't think so. If I had been an interview partner of him, I'd describe how I (as part of a three-person team) re-architected a 10-year old JEE application and converted it to a Jersey/Angular single-page app - while retaining parts of the old code that dealt with scientific calculations, replace other parts with a math library and found the flaws in the ORM configuration that made it take 30s for a page view.
After we were done, the same page took less than a second - but the thing that would "light me up" was the process of finding the performance bottlenecks and gradually arriving at a better understanding of exactly why bizarre flaws existed in the way the old application configured the ORM (lack of experience by the original developers and most likely external consultants that told them that using an ORM was professional but not teaching them enough on how to work with it)
After we were done, the same page took less than a second - but the thing that would "light me up" was the process of finding the performance bottlenecks and gradually arriving at a better understanding of exactly why bizarre flaws existed in the way the old application configured the ORM (lack of experience by the original developers and most likely external consultants that told them that using an ORM was professional but not teaching them enough on how to work with it)