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).
Enterprise Integration and Automation
Covers end to end design, architecture, implementation, and operational management of integrating software systems across an enterprise. Candidates should be able to design integration architectures that connect products with enterprise technology stacks such as customer relationship management systems, enterprise resource planning systems, data warehouses, and cloud platforms. Key topics include common integration patterns and anti patterns such as point to point, hub and spoke, enterprise service bus, publish subscribe and event driven architecture, and batch based extract transform load pipelines; interface choices including application programming interfaces, messaging, streaming and batch data exchanges; and trade offs in latency, throughput, delivery semantics and complexity. Data topics include data flow mapping, data quality, reconciliation, master data management, schema evolution, privacy and data governance. Strategy and operational concerns include migration and cutover planning, testing and rollback strategies, monitoring and observability of data flows and dependencies, service level agreement and capacity planning, performance and scalability under load, and incident response. Engineering details include version and contract management for interfaces, dependency and compatibility management, idempotency and error handling strategies, reconciliation and eventual consistency patterns, and practical troubleshooting for driver, protocol and component incompatibilities. Automation and workflow topics cover orchestration, choreography, workflow automation to reduce manual work, vendor selection and governance, and the trade offs between customization and configuration. Candidates should be able to identify integration risks, propose architecture and operational mitigations, and reason about testing, monitoring, security, maintainability and continuous improvement for integrated systems.
Integration Patterns and Messaging Systems
Understand approaches to integrating different systems: synchronous APIs, asynchronous messaging (queues, topics, events), batch processing, and data synchronization. Know when to use message queues vs. publish-subscribe vs. event streams. Understand the reliability patterns (acknowledgments, retries, dead-letter queues) and consistency implications. Know about API gateways, service discovery, and orchestration. Discuss trade-offs between tight coupling and loose coupling, and how integration choices affect system resilience.
System Integration and Standards
Covers designing and integrating new systems to interoperate with existing infrastructure while adhering to or thoughtfully deviating from industry standards. Topics include understanding relevant standards such as federal information processing standards and transport layer security standards, handling cryptographic compatibility and algorithm agility, designing for graceful degradation and backward compatibility, managing version compatibility and breaking changes, application programming interface versioning strategies, data migration during upgrades, legacy system integration patterns, and clear upgrade and deprecation strategies. Also includes risk identification and mitigation for compatibility issues, testing and validation approaches for integration points, and security considerations when connecting disparate systems.
Solution Architecture and System Integration
Designing end to end solutions that integrate multiple systems and services. Topics include API design and compatibility, protocol choices, data flow and transformation, middleware and orchestration, handling partial failures and eventual consistency, versioning and backward compatibility, and non functional requirements such as performance and security. Emphasis on mapping business requirements to technical solutions and integration strategies.