Company: Confluent
Role: SSE
Years of experience: 1.5
time: April 2025

My friend referred me at confluent and got a callback from the recruiter within 2 hours of being referred.

The interview was scheduled after 3 days and it has 3 technical round + 1 Engineering value round.
3 techincal rounds are scheduled before hand and based on the experience, engineering value round is setup.

After everything is cleared, you move to team matching round and then get offer.

Round 1:
Started very chill, just discussed experience and straight to question.
I was given to design the LRU cache with ttl (time to live).
operations will be to add new key,value pair with time, get key value pair and get average of totally active values in the store in most optimised way.

I clarified constraints and expectations first and then asked some clarifying questions like if key value pair would be given in strictly increasing time stamp.

Started with simple approach and then optimised based on the expectations like, memory heavy system, collisions, performance, read heavy, write heavy etc.

Round 2:
Again started with little intro and experience and then dsa question.
I was given to implement my own logging system where given a log file i need to print last N lines.
The problem has to be solved using file methods of language u preferred, u sed python.

Then optimising it, like what if many lines are there and have to keep printing on console, i proposed to use returning it line by line and then byte by byte etc to save space of the program.

Also then i have to print last N lines but in same order as in file, not reverse without storing everything.

Round 3
No intro, straight to question of dsa.
I was given the task to implement word search in a array of documents.
So basically i will be given an array of documents, each with doc number and complete data.
And a word, i have to find all doc number where the word is present.

Then task was to optimised, like how to initialise and create a processed format of data store and then search.

Next to improve it further to do phrase search. Asked some clarifying question and proposed the solution.
Interviewer asked to use 1 single data store which am creating during pre process step that could be used for both word search and phrase search.

I proposed it too, but because of lack of time, couldn't implement it further.

After 1 week, i got a call that am moving to engineering value round.

Engineering value round
Was just asked about experience, projects, challenges, volunteering efforts, mentorships, team and lost of grilling which is expected as usual.

After 1.5 week i got a call that i have cleared all rounds and moving to team matching.

After 1 more week, it got scheduled.

Team matching round
Just he asked about my experience and then told me about the work at team, culture. I asked many questions on same and the call went well.

After 3 days i got a call that they are moving to offer.
After 2 days i received a call that globally there is a hiring freeze, they will release the offer letter once its lifted.