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).
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.
RESTful API Design
Focuses on designing resource oriented web APIs following Representational State Transfer principles and proper use of the Hypertext Transfer Protocol. Core skills include resource modeling and endpoint naming, use of correct Hypertext Transfer Protocol methods and semantics, status code selection and error response structure, idempotency and stateless design, request and response formats such as JavaScript Object Notation, pagination, filtering and sorting strategies, versioning and backward compatibility, authentication and authorization patterns, rate limiting and abuse prevention, caching and performance considerations, API contract testing and documentation, common anti patterns, and designing APIs that balance client usability with backend implementation concerns.
Developer Experience and API Product Thinking
Focuses on designing products and platforms where the primary users are developers or engineering teams. Key areas assessed include developer onboarding, API design and usability, documentation and example code, developer tooling and SDKs, error diagnostics and observability, and developer support workflows. Candidates should be able to reason about how developer experience affects adoption, retention, time to first success, developer productivity, and downstream business metrics. Interview discussions may include making trade offs between API ergonomics and system constraints, designing developer contracts and versioning strategies, measuring developer satisfaction and success, integrating feedback loops from developer users, and aligning developer platform roadmaps with platform reliability and security goals. For platform and infrastructure products explore how to prioritize features for internal versus external developers, how to run research and experiments with small developer populations, and how to craft documentation, samples, and onboarding flows that reduce friction.
Application Programming Interface Design and Scalability
Designing application programming interfaces that remain reliable, performant, and maintainable at high scale. Candidates should understand how interface decisions affect scalability, availability, latency, and operational complexity and be able to reason about trade offs between client complexity and server responsibility. Core areas include stateless interface design, pagination and cursor strategies for large result sets, filtering and search optimization, payload minimization, batching and streaming, and techniques to reduce server load while preserving client experience. Resilience and operational controls include rate limiting and quota management, throttling, backpressure and flow control, retry semantics and idempotency patterns, error format design and explicit identification of retryable errors, and strategies for graceful degradation under overload. Evolution and compatibility topics include backward compatible versioning strategies, deprecation policies, contract design and testing approaches to avoid breaking consumers. Infrastructure and deployment considerations include API gateway and edge patterns, interaction with load balancers and traffic distribution, caching and content delivery, routing fault tolerance, health checks and canary rollout strategies, and observability through metrics, distributed tracing, and logging to support capacity planning and incident response. Security considerations such as scalable authentication and authorization, credential and key management, and permission models are also important. Candidates should be prepared to discuss concrete patterns, trade offs, algorithms, and operational playbooks for designing and running high traffic application programming interfaces.
Service Communication and API Design
Design and specify APIs and interservice communication patterns for systems that must scale. Topics include REST design and best practices, API versioning and deprecation strategies, backward compatibility and API evolution, contract design between services, choosing protocols such as gRPC versus HTTP for internal or external communication, security and authentication patterns at the API level, performance and scalability considerations, observability and monitoring of service interactions, and strategies for evolving interfaces without breaking consumers.
Data Management and Api Design
Designing how applications structure, expose, and consume data through APIs and backend systems. Covers API design principles for data endpoints, pagination, filtering and sorting, idempotency, versioning, rate limiting, schema design, normalization versus denormalization, consistency models, caching strategies, client side fetching patterns, and error handling. Includes considerations for data integrity across integrations, transactional boundaries, master data management, and how API decisions affect downstream consumers and performance.
Application Programming Interface Design and Strategy
Covers the design, developer experience, and strategic operating decisions for Application Programming Interfaces and developer platforms. Candidates should demonstrate core design principles such as simplicity, consistency, discoverability, clear naming and conventions, intuitive resource modeling, robust error handling, stability, backward compatibility, and explicit versioning strategies. They should understand trade offs among interface paradigms including Representational State Transfer style APIs, Graph Query Language approaches, and remote procedure call frameworks such as gRPC, and how those choices affect discoverability, latency, schema evolution, client ergonomics, testing, and mocking. The topic also includes the developer facing surface area beyond the interface itself: documentation, quickstart guides, sample code, software development kits, command line tools, interactive explorers, sandbox environments, and other onboarding artifacts that reduce friction. Candidates should be able to identify common friction points such as unclear documentation, complex setup and authentication flows, unhelpful error messages, inconsistent or surprising behaviors, slow feedback loops, and endpoints that are hard to mock or test, and propose concrete engineering and process solutions. Measurement and optimization expectations include onboarding and adoption metrics such as time to first successful call, time to first meaningful result, onboarding success rates, developer satisfaction and sentiment, adoption and churn, support and integration costs, error rates and latency, and how to instrument and monitor the developer journey. Engineering practices to discuss include stable contract design, semantic versioning and compatibility guarantees, schema and contract testing, clear deprecation policies, monitoring and observability for developer journeys, automated client generation and migration tooling, authentication and rate limiting strategies, webhook and event mechanisms, and monetization or partnership models for platform growth. Senior candidates should connect technical and experience decisions to product and business outcomes, explaining how design choices drive adoption, reduce support load, enable ecosystem growth, and preserve long term platform velocity, and should provide concrete examples of improvements implemented or proposed and how their impact was measured.
Application Programming Interface Design and Communication
Test the candidates ability to design clean application programming interfaces that are intuitive for clients and to clearly explain the design and its trade offs. Coverage includes resource and contract design, request and response formats, error handling and status conventions, versioning and backward compatibility, performance considerations, rate limiting and security basics, and selection of synchronous versus asynchronous communication approaches. At senior levels this expands to event driven patterns, message based systems, gateway patterns, and how interface decisions affect downstream systems and reliability.
Application Programming Interface Design and Rate Limiting
Focuses on designing scalable application programming interfaces that handle high request volumes while protecting infrastructure and preserving developer experience. Topics include API surface design and versioning, idempotency and retry semantics, authentication and authorization impacts, consistency and backward compatibility, and choosing protocols and payload formats. For scaling and protection discuss rate limiting and quota strategies such as token bucket, fixed window, sliding window, leaky bucket, per API key and per user limits, and hierarchical quotas. Cover backpressure, graceful degradation, circuit breakers, throttling responses and headers that communicate limits to clients, retry guidance, and strategies to avoid thundering herd effects. Also include operational concerns: monitoring and observability for request and error rates, metrics for usage and latency, metering and billing implications for usage based pricing, developer platform experience, documentation and developer tooling, testing at scale, and trade offs between strict protection and usability.