Confluent Software Engineer interview experience

I was asked to design the windowed hashmap in whatever language I preferred, and the whole thing leaned on thinking out loud while building the design.

What helped me was that the interviewer and I shared thoughts throughout instead of doing a cold, rapid-fire interrogation. It felt collaborative—more about working through the problem than landing on a memorized answer.

Overall, it was difficult, but in a constructive way. I left feeling like my approach and reasoning mattered more than perfection, even though I didn’t end up getting an offer.