I'm in Canada, interviewing for Senior I. Their old careers site has been shut down and you now have to apply through IBM, otherwise nobody pays any attention to you. It seems to be a transition period right now and the internal hiring pipeline is a bit of a mess. In two of my interviews, the interviewer didn't know they had to log into Teams, which threw things off.
Screen: the classic isVariadicFunction. The interviewer nudged me toward a hashmap solution. I had only prepared the trie approach, but I tried the hashmap and got it working.
VO round 1 (coding): Phrase Search. You are given multiple documents, and then:
First, return the documents that contain a given word, with exact match.
Second, given a phrase, return the documents that contain that phrase. The words in the phrase do not need to be adjacent in the document.
Maybe I went through the first two parts too fast, because the interviewer came up with a new twist on the spot: given multiple words joined by AND or OR, return all the documents that satisfy the query. I honestly thought this one was a bit easier than the previous part.
VO round 2 (coding): Sudoku Validator / Solver. Not hard, plain backtracking is enough.
VO round 3 (system design): design a podcast publish system. It is essentially the design-a-news-feed problem. Just walk the interviewer step by step from fan-out on read to fan-out on write and then to a hybrid model.
Final round (Values, BQ): the interviewer mainly dug into my projects. Before the interview the recruiter told me about Confluent's five core values, but in practice it felt more like a regular chat with the interviewer. The BQ was mainly "why Confluent?" plus a deep dive into one project.
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