Application Programming Interface Design and Communication Questions

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.

MediumTechnical

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Differentiate API throttling (rate limits) from concurrency limits (max simultaneous requests). Describe server-side enforcement techniques for both and client-side strategies to handle limit responses such as exponential backoff, jitter, queueing, and circuit breakers.

MediumSystem Design

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Describe the responsibilities and common patterns of an API gateway in a microservices architecture. Cover authentication, authorization, rate-limiting, request routing, protocol translation (GraphQL to REST or gRPC to HTTP), caching, telemetry, and trade-offs between an edge gateway and sidecar/service mesh approaches.

MediumTechnical

0 practiced

Design a cursor-based pagination scheme for a feed API where new items are frequently inserted. Explain how you would generate stable cursors, ensure monotonic ordering across pages, handle items deleted between requests, and design the response metadata (next cursor, prev cursor, approximate totals).

MediumTechnical

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What metrics and monitoring would you instrument to measure API health and meet SLAs? Include latency percentiles, error rates, availability, throughput, saturation, business metrics (orders/sec), and how you would configure SLOs, alerting thresholds, and dashboards to meaningfully reduce alert fatigue.

EasyTechnical

0 practiced

Compare offset-based pagination and cursor-based pagination. For each approach discuss typical response fields (limit, offset, next_cursor), performance characteristics on large datasets, issues when underlying data changes while paging, and which to choose for a social feed service.

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