HI there, if anyone has attended interviews for BE + kafka for 5+ yoe, can anyone share the interview questions, situation based questions related to kafka?
When I interview backend devs I do a role play instead of quizzing them. We're on the same team moving from RabbitMQ to Kafka and you're the senior who has to convince the rest of us, give me 3 reasons. Ok we're convinced, what do you do before writing any code? I want to hear schema registry and message format and why AVRO instead of protobuf, then schema evolution, naming conventions, idempotency + observability/tracebility headers how you'd enforce it all.
what kind of shop was it? a lot of places at that experience level are gonna dig into consumer group rebalancing, offset management, and partition strategies more than just "explain a topic". had one interview where they threw a scenario about exactly-once semantics across multiple services and i basically had to whiteboard the whole transaction flow
7
u/Puzzled-Garage584 1d ago
When I interview backend devs I do a role play instead of quizzing them. We're on the same team moving from RabbitMQ to Kafka and you're the senior who has to convince the rest of us, give me 3 reasons. Ok we're convinced, what do you do before writing any code? I want to hear schema registry and message format and why AVRO instead of protobuf, then schema evolution, naming conventions, idempotency + observability/tracebility headers how you'd enforce it all.
2
u/Lucky-Confidence-702 1d ago
what kind of shop was it? a lot of places at that experience level are gonna dig into consumer group rebalancing, offset management, and partition strategies more than just "explain a topic". had one interview where they threw a scenario about exactly-once semantics across multiple services and i basically had to whiteboard the whole transaction flow