System designHardsd-p080

Subject Api designLevel Senior~45 minCommon in Networking & APIs interviewsIndustries Software development, Technology

Question

Design the versioning and backward-compatibility strategy for a widely-used public API that must evolve without breaking existing clients.

What a strong answer looks like

Clarify scale and constraints first. Propose a clean component breakdown, then go deep on the hard parts — data model, bottlenecks, consistency, failure modes — and name the trade-offs you are making.

Learn the concepts

Narrate your design

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Run or narrate your approach, then ask the coach.