Developer Experience and API Product Thinking Questions

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.

HardTechnical

0 practiced

Define how your API should surface and handle partial failures and edge-case inputs, such as eventual consistency, missing dependent resources, or partial batch processing. Propose HTTP status codes, a partial-success response format, and helper SDK abstractions that allow clients to retry, resume, or inspect partial results safely.

HardTechnical

0 practiced

You are building an integration platform where multiple microservices expose API contracts used by downstream developer teams. Propose a governance model for API contracts that includes a contract registry, version policy, automated contract validation in CI, approval workflows for breaking changes, and a cross-team communication plan to manage contract evolution.

MediumTechnical

0 practiced

You own SDK releases across several languages. Describe a release workflow that covers semantic versioning, release branches, automated tests, security scanning, changelog generation, packaging and publishing to language-specific registries, and channels for gathering developer feedback and rolling back releases when necessary.

EasyTechnical

0 practiced

Write concise, idiomatic code samples in Python, JavaScript, and Go that perform an authenticated GET to /v1/users, parse a 200 response JSON list, and handle a 401 unauthorized response. The samples will be used in a Quickstart to enable Time To First Success; keep them minimal and copy-paste ready.

MediumTechnical

0 practiced

Explain strategies for API versioning such as URI versioning, header-based versioning, content negotiation, and semantic versioning for SDKs. Discuss pros and cons for discoverability, cacheability, backward compatibility, and developer migration friction. Propose a pragmatic versioning policy for a public API with many third-party integrations.

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