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.
Sales Automation and Integration Concepts
Understand what sales automation is (automating repetitive tasks, workflows, and communications). Know examples: automated email sequences, lead scoring, workflow triggers, reporting automation. Understand basic integration concepts—why you'd integrate CRM with marketing, finance, or HR systems, and common challenges (data consistency, latency, errors).
Sales Operations Process Architecture
Assess the candidate ability to design interconnected operational processes and the supporting system integration required for reliable execution. Candidates should explain how they map end to end workflows identify dependencies between customer relationship management order management and finance systems define ownership and service level objectives and design data flows and error handling. Include discussion of change control monitoring alerting documentation and governance practices that keep the architecture maintainable and scalable.