Confluent screen had the longest problem statement I've seen

Confluent screen had the longest problem statement I've seen

Had my Confluent phone screen last week, one round, still waiting to hear back.

The question was about a food delivery service trying to get every item on a customer's list for the lowest possible price, except the menu wasn't priced per item, it was priced per combo listing, and a lot of the combos overlapped and had extra stuff mixed in that you didn't need. So you had to figure out the cheapest set of combos that together covered everything the customer wanted, ignoring anything extra that came along for the ride. And if there was no way to cover every requested item at all, you had to signal that back somehow.

Honestly the setup itself was like reading a novel before I even got to the coding part. Once I got past that, it clicked as a set cover style DP problem where each combo is basically a bitmask over the wanted items. The follow up narrowed things down, they asked how the approach changes if the customer only ever wants up to three items total, which opens the door to just enumerating subsets directly instead of the general DP.

Interviewer was solid, let me think out loud and didn't rush me even though the prompt ate up a chunk of the time. No idea if I'm moving forward but the problem itself was honestly kind of fun once it clicked.