Integration Patterns and API Design Questions

Focuses on integration concepts, data flow, and API design as the foundation for connecting systems and services. Coverage includes data integration techniques such as ETL and ELT, change data capture, data warehousing, synchronization and eventual consistency challenges, latency and throughput considerations, middleware and messaging solutions, and common integration patterns used in marketing and enterprise stacks. For APIs, topics include what APIs are and why they matter for developer products, REST versus GraphQL trade offs and use cases, HTTP methods and semantics, authentication and authorization patterns, rate limiting and throttling, versioning strategies, idempotency and error handling, documentation and developer experience, monitoring and service level considerations, and how API choices affect product and business decisions.

EasyTechnical

21 practiced

Explain the difference between ETL and ELT in data integration. As a TPM responsible for a platform that feeds an analytics warehouse, describe which approach you'd choose for fast, near-real-time analytics vs. heavy transformation needs and why.

HardSystem Design

25 practiced

You must migrate an ecosystem of enterprise partners from legacy SOAP integrations to a new REST/GraphQL platform with minimal downtime and partner friction. Create a migration plan that includes adapter/proxy strategies, compatibility modes, partner communication, incremental testing, SDK/tooling to reduce partner work, and rollback/playback mechanisms.

HardSystem Design

31 practiced

Architect a global API platform that must satisfy regional data residency (EU, APAC, US) and compliance (GDPR, local privacy laws). Describe how you'd route traffic, store customer data regionally, handle cross-region failover for resilience, and design metadata replication while minimizing data egress and compliance risk.

EasyTechnical

28 practiced

Explain what webhooks are and when you would choose webhooks over polling for integrations. Describe three reliability and security patterns to implement for webhooks (for example: retries, signing, dead-letter handling) and briefly outline how you would present webhook guarantees in product documentation.

MediumSystem Design

25 practiced

Design a bi-directional synchronization strategy between a SaaS product and enterprise CRM that supports occasional offline edits. Discuss conflict resolution strategies, identity mapping, partial updates, bandwidth considerations, and how you'd expose reconciliation visibility to administrators.

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