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).
Marketing Technology Integration and Architecture
Technical and architectural knowledge for integrating marketing technology systems and designing reliable data flows between platforms. Candidates should be able to explain common integration approaches including native connectors, middleware and integration platforms, custom application programming interface integrations, webhooks, extract transform load and extract load transform pipelines, and orchestration versus choreography. They should understand synchronization models such as event driven streaming and batch transfer, real time processing versus batch processing trade offs, and rate limiting and throughput considerations. Core data topics include data mapping and schema alignment, canonical data models, identity resolution and deduplication, single source of truth strategies, and methods for resolving data inconsistencies. Operational and reliability concerns include error handling and recovery strategies, retries and idempotency, latency and throughput trade offs, monitoring and observability, logging and tracing, testing and validation including contract testing and replay testing, and planning for future tool changes through versioning and abstraction. Security and authentication, data privacy and consent management, encryption, and data governance should be addressed as integral parts of any integration design.
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.
API Integration and System Connectivity
Covers the end to end concepts and practices for connecting systems using application programming interfaces and integration middleware. Candidates should understand REST and HTTP fundamentals, webhooks versus polling, API authentication and authorization patterns, request and response formats, rate limiting, versioning, and reading API documentation. Include practical skills for building and troubleshooting integrations: data mapping and transformation, schema mapping, message formats, error handling and retry strategies, idempotency, logging and monitoring, and ensuring data consistency across synchronous and asynchronous flows. Also includes integration tooling and middleware platforms, real time versus batch synchronization, designing for partial failures and back pressure, and frontend concerns such as async data fetching, loading and error states, pagination, optimistic updates, and race condition mitigation.
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.
Integration Patterns and API Design
Focuses on integration concepts, data flow, and API design as the foundation for connecting systems and services. Coverage includes data integration techniques such as ETL and ELT, change data capture, data warehousing, synchronization and eventual consistency challenges, latency and throughput considerations, middleware and messaging solutions, and common integration patterns used in marketing and enterprise stacks. For APIs, topics include what APIs are and why they matter for developer products, REST versus GraphQL trade offs and use cases, HTTP methods and semantics, authentication and authorization patterns, rate limiting and throttling, versioning strategies, idempotency and error handling, documentation and developer experience, monitoring and service level considerations, and how API choices affect product and business decisions.
Customer Relationship Management and Data Integration
Encompasses customer relationship management platforms and the challenges of CRM data management and integration. Topics include data models and object relationships, contact and account hierarchies, custom fields and validation rules, duplicate record handling, data hygiene and governance, API based integrations, data mapping and transformation, synchronization with marketing automation and other systems, integration patterns and middleware, and common data quality issues. Candidates should be able to explain trade offs in integration approaches and strategies to maintain consistency across systems.
Integration and Synchronization Troubleshooting
Focuses on diagnosing and resolving integration and data synchronization problems between systems and services. Topics include identifying missing or inconsistent data, real time delays and intermittent failures, and end to end latency; verifying application programming interface connectivity, authentication, and authorization; examining message queueing behavior, backpressure, and retry semantics; handling idempotency and duplicate message issues; resolving schema mismatches, data mapping and validation errors; using monitoring, logging, and distributed tracing to correlate events; testing data flows, performing backfill and replay strategies, and implementing resilient error handling and reconciliation processes. Emphasis is on diagnostic methodology, hypothesis driven testing, and cross system coordination rather than only code changes.