Your question is API Request Lifecycle. Take a moment with it on the right.
Talk me through your thinking if you like. When you're confident, submit your answer and I'll grade it like a real screen (7/10 or better passes).
Walk me through the lifecycle of an API request in your most recent project.
Explain the request path from client or caller through routing, authentication and authorization, validation, business logic, data or feature access, model inference where applicable, response construction, and observability. Discuss which work was synchronous versus asynchronous, how latency and failures were handled, and how you would verify that the request was processed correctly.