API and Full Stack Coding Patterns Questions
Beyond pure algorithms, be prepared for problems that combine algorithmic thinking with API design, rate limiting, caching strategies, or distributed system concepts. Understanding how a coding solution fits into a larger fullstack architecture.
HardTechnical
84 practiced
Case study: A third-party payment provider will deprecate their v1 webhook format in 3 months. You run SRE for a merchant platform. Create a migration plan that includes detecting impacted merchants, building compatibility shims or adapters, SDK updates, rollout timeline, monitoring and rollback strategy, and legal/operational considerations.
HardTechnical
76 practiced
Describe a time (or hypothetical) when you had to push back on a product team's request to make a breaking API change. As an SRE lead, walk through how you would evaluate the risk, present alternatives (versioning, feature flags, adapter layers), and drive a decision balancing business impact and reliability. Emphasize stakeholder communication and technical analysis.
HardTechnical
71 practiced
Design and provide pseudocode for a mechanism that invalidates a distributed cache across regions when a write occurs in one region, ensuring readers in other regions see fresh data within 1 second while minimizing cross-region bandwidth. Discuss the trade-offs and failure modes.
EasyTechnical
73 practiced
Describe pros and cons of offset-based vs cursor-based pagination for APIs. As an SRE, explain how each approach affects caching, load on downstream services, and consistency for a frequently mutating user feed. Make a recommendation for a social feed that is updated often.
EasyTechnical
86 practiced
An API receives duplicate POST requests because clients retry on timeouts. As an SRE, describe a server-side idempotency design for POST operations including how clients provide idempotency keys, what you store server-side, TTL for keys, how to handle partial failures, and trade-offs of storing responses vs storing request hashes.
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