Kafka Internals — Senior ScreeningA senior-level technical screen. These probe the internals and the tradeoffs interviewers use to separate people who've operated Kafka in production from those who've only read about it.

What does min.insync.replicas actually control?

With replication.factor=3 and min.insync.replicas=2, how many broker failures can a partition tolerate while still accepting acks=all writes?

What is the precise risk of enabling unclean.leader.election.enable=true?

A producer needs strong ordering AND no duplicates on retries. What do you configure?

Consumer group rebalances are disruptive. Which feature most reduces rebalance impact for rolling restarts?

What primarily determines the maximum consumer parallelism for a topic?

Exactly-once semantics (EOS) across a consume-process-produce loop in Kafka requires...

You must add partitions to a keyed topic to scale throughput. What's the main correctness concern?