One of the hiring managers reached out to me for an interview at Confluent and then connected with two recruiters to move forward in the process. I completed a one-hour technical screen, which I did not pass. I believe the onsite interview is four hours long.

The interviewer asked a LeetCode hard question for the tech screen. This came as a bit of a surprise because Facebook has made it a policy to avoid dynamic programming questions, and even Microsoft and Amazon don't ask LC hard questions during their tech screens.

I am not an algorithms expert and did not expect the barrier to be this high. I spend most of my spare time focusing on practical skills because I rarely get to apply medium-level algorithms at the workplace, and implementing hard algorithms hasn't been part of my roles until now. I don't even know how much more difficult their onsite would have been.

The interviewer wasn't very helpful either. He kept asking me to think of test cases where my algorithm would fail but couldn't describe those test cases properly.

Implement logic to see if a string matches a given regular expression.