LinkedIn uses a unified API server to power our new flagship experience on all platforms (desktop web, mobile web, iOS and Android). The API and clients are released using a completely automated continuous release and deployment pipeline, to enable a rapidly evolving product.

We explore our original ideas behind API modeling, the challenges we’ve faced, and how we are evolving our modeling strategy over time based on our learnings. We will present a use-case study of building the templated API behind LinkedIn’s new in-app notification experience. This new API allows new notification types to be rapidly introduced without requiring any client-side changes while continuing to preserve baseline requirements around backward compatibility, data consistency and caching.