Top 4 Integration Interview Questions
Browse 4 real-world technical and behavioral interview questions about Integration. Review scenarios, edge cases, and architectural best practices.
What is FHIR, and when would you still be dealing with HL7 v2?
FHIR is a resource-oriented REST API with a defined set of resources, constrained for real use by profiles and implementation guides. HL7 v2 is the older pipe-delimited messaging standard that still carries most of the event traffic inside hospitals, so the two coexist and an integration engine translates between them.
The electronic record will be down for a four-hour upgrade, and it also fails without warning. How does a ward keep working?
Plan for four modes rather than one: a continuously fed read-only viewer on independent infrastructure, printed ward-level essentials, paper ordering with pre-allocated temporary identifiers, and a recovery process that backloads events at their original times and reviews everything that queued during the window.
Service A needs something from service B. When should that be a synchronous call and when should it be an event?
A synchronous call couples availability and latency but keeps the outcome knowable at the point of decision; an event decouples both but converts every failure into something the caller will never learn about. Choose by asking whether the caller needs the answer to proceed, not by which style is fashionable.
Two teams build one product and they have different sprint lengths, different boards, different estimation units and different definitions of done. A programme manager wants them standardised. What would you standardise and what would you leave alone?
Very little has to be common, and one thing genuinely does: teams releasing one product must share a Definition of Done. Standardise what a joint release depends on, leave cadence, boards and estimation units local, and refuse uniformity whose only benefit is a comparable dashboard.