During my recent job search, Confluent was by far the most challenging and thorough process.

It consisted of:

• A phone screen with the recruiter (who is a Confluent FTE, not a contractor)
• The hiring manager
• Four technical interviews with senior engineers
• A discussion with the VP of Engineering
• A final conversation with the hiring manager

I felt I was treated very fairly and given an adequate chance to demonstrate my skills and knowledge.

Having been in the industry for several years, I found the coding exercises somewhat contrived and difficult. I struggled with them but managed to get through all of them.

I should add this interview process was done 100% over the phone (Zoom).

Two of the technical interviews were system design and architecture questions. These are meant to test your knowledge of distributed systems, databases, replication, caching, etc.

The other two technical interviews were algorithms coding problems. Make sure you are current on threading/concurrency, data structures (trees especially), and other algorithmic types of problems.

Other reviews here on Glassdoor have more information, and they were fairly accurate.