Target·Software Engineer

Target Software Engineer interview experience

No offer

~2+ YOEPosted Jan 2026 · Candidate report, summarized by Dataford

I started out with a technical discussion that felt like it should’ve been straightforward, but it quickly became awkward.

The interview kept coming back to Kafka, and I tried to explain it as a distributed log system. The interviewer didn’t seem to accept that framing and kept pushing back that it wasn’t what I said, even after I clarified my understanding.

What threw me off most was that once the topic veered off, the rest of the conversation still stayed deep and technical. Even though I explicitly noted I didn’t have experience with NoSQL databases and had only worked with SQL, the interviewer still asked detailed questions about NoSQL. By the end, it felt less like we were aligning on shared fundamentals

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