System Design

API Design

6 practice questions. Free questions open a full answer guide; the rest unlock with Pro.

  • We're exposing a public REST API that returns a large, frequently-changing list of orders. How would you design the pagination, and why? Mid level
  • You're designing the second major version of a public API that thousands of external clients already depend on. How do you ship breaking changes without breaking those clients?Go Pro Mid level
  • Design a multi-region active-active deployment for a stateful API with a PostgreSQL backend. Target RTO < 1 minute and RPO < 5 seconds.Go Pro Senior level
  • How would you design the API contract strategy for a platform used by hundreds of external developers? Address versioning, deprecation, and backward compatibility.Go Pro Staff-principal level
  • You're designing a public payments API where clients will retry on timeouts. How do you make the mutating endpoints safe to retry so a network retry can't create a duplicate charge?Go Pro Staff-principal level
  • You need to design a secrets management system for a platform with 50 microservices across EKS and Lambda. Secrets must rotate automatically and any rotation must not require a service restart. How do you architect this?Go Pro Senior level
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