Explain how to make robust HTTP API calls

Company: Airtable

Role: Software Engineer

Category: Software Engineering Fundamentals

Difficulty: medium

Interview Round: Onsite

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.