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TL;DR

A system design interview is not a test of whether you know what Kafka is. It is a test of whether you can take a vague one-sentence prompt, turn it into a bounded problem with explicit numbers, and then defend a small number of decisions against the constraints you just established. Candidates fail far more often from starting to draw boxes in the first two minutes than from not knowing a technology. The reliable structure is: pin down requirements, put numbers on them, sketch the smallest thing that works, then scale only the specific component the numbers say will break first.