Confluent Cloud Engineer interview experience

The initial conversations matched the excitement I already had about their product direction, especially the idea of treating Kafka as a central nervous system for large systems. The first part of the process felt promising, but the follow-through later felt inconsistent with what was described.

The interview journey included a recruiter phone screen, then another phone screen with the hiring manager. After that came take-home work: a coding assignment followed by a take-home design assignment that I had to present in person. There was also an in-person/Zoom day in Palo Alto, plus additional