Anthropic
Medium
Software EngineerOptimize HTTP requests for speed and limits
System Design
26
0
December 8, 2025
API Design Interview Questions
API design questions test your ability to create clean, scalable, and secure interfaces between services and clients.
Expect discussions on REST vs GraphQL, pagination strategies, rate limiting, versioning, and authentication patterns.
Interviewers want to see practical design sense, not just theoretical knowledge of HTTP methods.
935Questions
167Companies
Easy 44 • Medium 1 • Hard 468Difficulty mix
Common API design interview patterns
- REST resource modeling and URL structure
- GraphQL vs REST trade-offs
- Cursor-based vs offset pagination
- Rate limiting and throttling strategies
- API versioning approaches
- Idempotency for safe retries
- Authentication and authorization patterns (OAuth, JWT, API keys)
API design interview questions
Filter and sort
Jane Street
Easy
Software EngineerDesign exchange–trading system message flow
System Design
44
0
December 15, 2025
Netflix
Hard
Software EngineerDesign ads frequency capping service
System Design
22
0
July 17, 2025
Shopify
Hard
Software EngineerDesign a rare-book lending and returns system
System Design
43
0
July 16, 2025
Google
Medium
Machine Learning EngineerDesign a fraud detection system
ML System Design
37
0
January 22, 2026
Citadel
Hard
Software EngineerDesign a low-latency trading system
System Design
31
0
August 9, 2025
OpenAI
Hard
Software EngineerDesign a CI/CD system with stuck-job handling
System Design
40
0
December 15, 2025
Palantir
Hard
Software EngineerDesign an internal interest-matching platform
System Design
32
0
July 15, 2025
Da Vinci Trading
Hard
Software EngineerDesign an in-memory order matching engine
System Design
40
0
December 8, 2025
OpenAI
Hard
Software EngineerDesign a CI/CD pipeline with scheduler
System Design
24
0
August 13, 2025
Optiver
Hard
Software EngineerDesign a topic-based news subscription system
System Design
18
0
September 6, 2025
Anthropic
Medium
Software EngineerHow would you scale batch image pipelines?
System Design
17
0
November 10, 2025
Rippling
Medium
Software EngineerDesign centralized log ingestion and query system
System Design
36
0
January 22, 2026
OpenAI
Hard
Software EngineerDesign a payment processing system
System Design
27
0
December 15, 2025
DoorDash
Medium
Software EngineerDesign a donation service for a 3‑day charity
System Design
18
0
January 18, 2026
Uber
Hard
Software EngineerDesign Uber Eats-style search function
System Design
24
0
November 11, 2025
Anthropic
Hard
Software EngineerHow do you handle an LLM agents interview?
ML System Design
27
0
March 1, 2026
DoorDash
Medium
Software EngineerDesign API that aggregates three downstream APIs
System Design
18
0
November 4, 2025
Chime
Hard
Software EngineerDesign mobile check deposit system
System Design
28
0
July 27, 2025
Airbnb
Hard
Software EngineerDesign a real-time chat system with hot groups
System Design
35
0
January 22, 2026
Common mistakes with API design
- Overusing POST for operations that should be GET
- Not designing for backward compatibility
- Exposing internal implementation details in the API surface
- Ignoring error response formats and status codes
- Not considering rate limiting from the start
How API design questions are evaluated
Design for the consumer, not the implementation.
Show awareness of backward compatibility and versioning from day one.
Discuss security considerations naturally as part of the design.