Confluent SSE-2 Interview Experience | Awaiting Update

I was approached by a recruiter through LinkedIn for the SSE-2 role at Confluent.

The interview process consisted of two system design rounds.

Round 1: System Design |

Problem Statement: Design a temporary email service where users can generate disposable email addresses and receive emails without creating an account.

Key Requirements:

• Each email address should remain valid for only 10 minutes.

• Emails received at these addresses should also expire after 10 minutes.

• The service should be anonymous and should not collect users' personal information.

Discussion Points:

The design needed to cover how temporary email addresses would be generated, how incoming emails would be routed to the correct address, and how messages would be stored and retrieved during their validity period.

Another important aspect was handling expiration. The system needed to ensure that expired addresses and emails could no longer be accessed, while also considering how the underlying data would be cleaned up efficiently.

Round 2: System Design ||

Problem Statement: Design a podcast aggregator where users can subscribe to specific topics and seamlessly retrieve content related to their subscriptions.

Key Requirements:

• Users should be able to subscribe to their preferred topics.

• Relevant podcast content should be easily accessible to subscribers.

• The system should scale efficiently, assuming read requests are much more frequent than write requests.

The primary challenge was designing the system around a read-heavy workload. Since users would frequently retrieve subscribed content, the architecture needed to prioritize low-latency reads and efficient content delivery.

The discussion involved how to organize podcast content by topic, store user subscriptions, and retrieve relevant episodes for each user.

Scalability was another important consideration. As the number of users, subscriptions, and podcast episodes increased, the system needed to continue serving content efficiently without making every read request unnecessarily expensive.

Interview Outcome

Both system design rounds went very well, and I felt positive about my performance.

However, after the second round, I stopped receiving updates from the recruitment team. I tried reaching out to the recruiter and the relevant points of contact, but I haven't received a response.

It's been around one months since the second round, and I'm still waiting for an update.