What this round tests
- API contract design and integration concerns
- Reliability vs feature velocity trade-offs
- Engineering alignment — picking the right level of detail
What interviewers are listening for
- You can read a system diagram and ask the right questions
- You know when to push back on tech debt vs ship
- You explain trade-offs in eng-friendly language
Common mistakes
- Pretending to be the architect
- Punting on every reliability question
- Not knowing the difference between a 4xx and 5xx
Concepts tested in technical
Practice questions (23)
- Plan a partner API launch
- Postmortem you led
- Microservices vs. monolith for a small team
- Batch vs. streaming for a metrics product
- Rate limits for a public API
- Migrate to a new identity provider
- SLOs for a payments product
- Versioning a public API
- Communicate a breaking API change
- GraphQL vs REST for a partner API
- Internal-only API or partner-grade?
- Webhooks vs polling design
- Pagination semantics
- Re-platforming roadmap
- When to require a tech spec
- Quarterly tech-debt budget
- Cross-team architecture review
- Scope a 1-week spike
- Set an error budget
- Build a postmortem culture
- Capacity planning for a launch
- Privacy-aware analytics design
- Migrate off a vendor dependency
Practice this round in PrepOS
Calibrate your target level, set the practice category to technical, and the adaptive queue will surface the highest-impact reps first.
Practice technical →