Confluent Solutions Engineer interview experience

I spent time with both the recruiter and the hiring manager going through my background in detail, and I was explicitly told that specialized knowledge of their products or data streaming wasn’t required.

Then the technical interview came, and the focus didn’t match what I’d been led to expect. The one-hour conversation centered on cloud technologies and data management, with only a tiny amount of discussion tied to Kafka. Afterward, I later learned they weren’t proceeding because they were actually seeking someone with data streaming experience. That mismatch made the whole thing feel like