Interview Guide — Kafka for Spring Microservices Developers

This guide prepares you for Kafka interviews at all levels — from junior to senior/architect.

Structure

Section Focus Questions
Core Concepts Q&A Kafka fundamentals — topics, partitions, offsets, retention 15 Q&As
Spring Kafka Q&A Spring-specific — @KafkaListener, KafkaTemplate, factories, ack modes 15 Q&As
Error Handling & Schema Q&A DLT, retry, Avro, Schema Registry compatibility 12 Q&As
Scenario & System Design Open-ended design questions drawn from real use cases 10 scenarios

How to Use This Guide

Approach

  1. Read the question — try to answer out loud before reading the answer
  2. Compare your answer to the model answer — note gaps
  3. Relate to this project — every answer is grounded in the code you've built

Interview Difficulty Levels

  • 🟢 Entry — Junior / 1–2 years Kafka experience
  • 🟡 Mid — Mid-level / 2–4 years
  • 🔴 Senior — Senior / Architect level