Fetch and process JSON from REST API
Company: Motive
Role: Software Engineer
Category: Data Manipulation (SQL/Python)
Difficulty: Medium
Interview Round: Onsite
Given a REST endpoint that returns a JSON payload, set up a coding environment, perform an HTTP GET, parse the JSON, and extract specified fields to produce a required output (e.g., aggregates per category and the top-k items). Write runnable code that handles pagination, rate limits, retries with backoff, timeouts, and malformed/partial data. Explain your approach, edge cases, and time/space complexity.
Quick Answer: This question evaluates a candidate's ability to implement robust API integration and data processing, including HTTP requests, JSON parsing, pagination, rate limiting, retries with backoff, timeouts, handling malformed or partial data, and performing aggregations and top-k computations.