Explain how to make robust HTTP API calls
Company: Airtable
Role: Software Engineer
Category: Software Engineering Fundamentals
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Onsite
## SWE Fundamentals: Making Robust HTTP Calls (Client/Service)
You need to integrate with an external HTTP API (could be an internal microservice or a third-party service). The call is on the critical path of a user request.
### Prompt
Explain how you would implement this HTTP integration robustly:
- Which HTTP method(s) you would use and why
- Timeouts (connect/read), retries, and backoff
- Which failures are retryable vs not
- Authentication and headers
- Rate limiting and pagination
- Observability (logging/metrics/tracing)
- How you would avoid duplicate side effects (idempotency)
Assume high QPS and that the external API can be slow or intermittently failing.
Quick Answer: This question evaluates understanding of robust HTTP API integration, covering reliability and resilience topics such as timeouts, retries and backoff, idempotency, authentication and headers, rate limiting, pagination, and observability in high‑QPS client-service interactions.