APIs, Networking & Integration Topics
API design, management, and integration patterns including REST, GraphQL, and other protocols. Covers API contract design, versioning strategies, error handling, idempotency, deprecation planning, and SDK/integration frameworks. Includes system-to-system integration, webhook patterns, and integration platform considerations. Excludes network infrastructure and network-layer protocols (see Network Architecture under Cloud & Infrastructure or a dedicated networking category if needed).
Application Programming Interface Design and Integration
Designing Application Programming Interfaces and selecting communication protocols to meet functional and non functional requirements. Candidates should be able to evaluate and choose between Representational State Transfer style resource oriented interfaces, Graph Query Language approaches, remote procedure call frameworks such as Google Remote Procedure Call, and message based or event driven integration patterns. Discussion should cover protocol and format trade offs including latency, throughput, consistency and ordering, binary versus text serialization formats such as protocol buffers or JavaScript Object Notation, developer ergonomics, client diversity, and resource consumption. Core design topics include contract design and schema evolution, versioning and backward compatibility strategies, pagination, filtering, sorting and error handling conventions, authentication and authorization models, rate limiting and quota strategies, caching choices, and gateway or proxy patterns. Integration concerns include direct synchronous calls, asynchronous message based decoupling, event streaming, and web hooks, plus client and server software development kits and data transformation between layers. Candidates should also explain resilience and reliability patterns such as timeouts, retries, circuit breaker and bulkhead techniques, and describe testing, monitoring and observability approaches including logging, metrics and distributed tracing. Finally, discussion should connect API and protocol choices to coupling, scalability, operational complexity, security posture, and developer productivity.
Developer Documentation and Tools
Covers the full scope of developer experience around a technical platform, including platform stability, API documentation, developer tooling, and software development kits. Candidates should be prepared to discuss endpoint documentation patterns, request and response examples, error handling guidance, authentication and authorization documentation, rate limiting and quotas, and migration and changelog management. Include practical aspects such as code samples in multiple languages, example applications, SDK design and maintenance, developer testing tools, and integrations with modern documentation toolchains like OpenAPI and GraphQL schemas. Also cover how documentation quality and developer tools affect adoption and support burden, metrics for measurement such as search success rate and example usage, strategies for keeping examples current, versioning and backward compatibility challenges, and holistic approaches to improving developer experience beyond API design.
API Design and Implementation
Design and implement application programming interfaces and the server side request handling required for production services. Topics include resource modeling and endpoint design, representational state transfer versus remote procedure call systems and when to choose each, HTTP method semantics and status codes, pagination and cursor strategies, versioning and backward compatibility, rate limiting and throttling headers, idempotency and exactly once processing approaches, request validation and middleware patterns, error response design and retry semantics, serialization formats and schema evolution, streaming endpoints, contract definition and interface tooling, security at the API boundary, monitoring and observability for APIs, and trade offs between public internet facing APIs and high performance internal RPCs.