As agentic AI systems increasingly rely on APIs as their nervous system, the performance bar has fundamentally shifted. A human tolerates a 400ms response; an AI orchestration loop calling twelve APIs in sequence does not. In this session, we explore five battle-tested engineering pillars for building APIs that are both high-throughput and predictably low-latency, drawn from real-world architecture at enterprise scale in financial services.
We'll cover protocol selection tradeoffs (REST vs. gRPC vs. GraphQL vs. emerging MCP patterns), multi-layer caching architectures, async/non-blocking patterns, payload optimization, and observability-driven performance tuning with p99 focus. Attendees will leave with a practical design checklist, common anti-patterns to avoid, and a mental model for evaluating latency at every layer of the API stack, whether they're serving mobile clients, microservices, or autonomous AI agents.