Intermediatecultural fit
Cultural fit: Describe how you handled cross-team API integration where teams disagreed on contract design and ownership. How did you reach a resolution and ensure smooth collaboration going forward?
Backend Developer
General

Sample Answer

Situation: Two teams needed to integrate: search service depended on an analytics team’s event API, but disagreements on payload shape and versioning caused delays. Task: I needed to align both teams and unblock integration. Action: I organized a short design workshop to list use-cases, proposed a contract-first approach with OpenAPI and semantic versioning, and suggested a compatibility matrix. I advocated for a shared ownership model: the analytics team owns the API implementation while the search team owns a client adapter that translates versions. We agreed on backwards-compatible changes for three quarters and created a contract-testing CI job that fails on breaking changes. I also arranged monthly syncs and a shared runbook for incident handling. Result: Integration time dropped by 70% compared to prior integrations, and cross-team API-related bugs fell by 60% in the next two releases. Collaboration improved thanks to transparent contracts and shared CI tests.

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