What your account has
Two limits work together — a throughput limit, which is a rate with a burst allowance on top of it, and a quota:
Most accounts are provisioned at 20 requests per second with a burst of 50. Quotas vary more, so treat the rate as the number to design against and check your own quota with your Kira contact.
When you hit it
You get a429.
Both limits produce the same status: the per-second one when you are going too fast right now, and the quota when you have used your allowance for the period. What separates them is that the first clears in a moment and the second does not.
Staying under it
Back off, do not retry immediately. Wait, then retry with the wait doubling each time. Retrying a429 at once makes it worse and is the fastest way to stay limited.
Do not poll. Almost everything worth knowing announces itself — see Webhooks. Polling is the most common reason an integration meets a rate limit at all, and it is avoidable.
Spread scheduled work. A nightly job that fires everything at midnight uses your burst in a second and then queues behind your rate. Pace it.
Ask before you need to. If your volume is growing, your limit is a configuration change rather than a rewrite — but it is not self-serve, so ask ahead of the launch rather than during it.