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.
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.
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.
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.
API Design and Integration
Design and evaluate application programming interfaces for external and internal consumption. Topics include resource and schema modeling for RESTful APIs, GraphQL schema and resolver design for diverse clients, and when to choose gRPC style remote procedure calls for high performance internal services. Candidates should address consistent error responses including problem details, pagination and filtering strategies, versioning and deprecation plans, idempotency keys and safe retry semantics, rate limiting headers and status codes, authentication and authorization patterns, contract testing, monitoring and observability, and how to balance backward compatibility with iteration velocity.
Custom Solution Architecture
Evaluates ability to design bespoke technical solutions that integrate a platform with customer systems. Topics include integration patterns for synchronous and asynchronous data exchange, data flows and transformation, identity and access management, secure connectivity and encryption, schema and contract management, scaling and partitioning to meet customer volume, error handling and idempotency, phased implementation and migration plans, testing and validation approaches, monitoring and operational readiness, and cost and compliance considerations.
Integration and Technical Capabilities
Focuses on the technical connectivity and integration surface that a product exposes and on how customers can consume and integrate those capabilities. Topics include application programming interface design and authentication models, data formats and transformation patterns, batch versus streaming approaches, webhooks and software development kits, rate limits and throttling behaviors, developer documentation and example code, error handling and testing strategies, monitoring and observability, and common integration points such as customer relationship management systems and enterprise resource planning systems. Candidates should be able to describe tradeoffs, estimate integration effort, and recommend patterns for robust, secure, and maintainable integrations.
Application Programming Interface Design
Designing application programming interfaces for enterprise integration involves creating clear, stable contracts and integration patterns that support security, scale, and maintainability. Candidates should be able to discuss endpoint design and representation styles such as representational state transfer or remote procedure call frameworks, authentication and authorization approaches including token based flows and single sign on, and how to protect data in transit and at rest. Important considerations include pagination and bulk patterns, rate limiting and back pressure, idempotency and retry semantics, error models and consistent error codes, versioning and deprecation strategies to preserve backward compatibility, and schema evolution for request and response payloads. At enterprise scale evaluate performance and scaling strategies such as stateless service design, caching, horizontal scaling of the gateway and application tiers, and the use of an intermediary gateway for routing, authentication, and observability. Integration patterns should cover synchronous request response as well as asynchronous callbacks and event driven approaches where appropriate, and explain how to correlate requests across distributed components with correlation identifiers and tracing. Finally demonstrate attention to developer experience with clear documentation and example clients, testing strategies including sandbox and staging environments, monitoring and alerting for latency and error rates, and operational plans for rollout, version migration, and support.