Architect a distributed Order Processing Engine
Last updated: December 26, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a distributed order processing system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Coinbase
December 26, 2025490
10
1,450 solved
Design a distributed order processing system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
This is a common system design question asked during Technical Screen at Coinbase. The interviewer expects you to demonstrate your ability to design large-scale distributed systems, make well-reasoned trade-offs, and communicate your thought process clearly. Coinbase values engineers who can think about scalability from day one.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Clearly define functional and non-functional requirements
- Propose a reasonable high-level architecture with core components
- Choose appropriate data storage solutions with basic justification
- Discuss basic scaling strategies (horizontal scaling, caching)
- Identify potential bottlenecks and suggest simple solutions
Key Topics to Cover
How to Approach This
- Start by clarifying functional and non-functional requirements with the interviewer.
- Estimate the scale: QPS, storage, bandwidth. This drives your design decisions.
- Draw a high-level architecture first, then deep dive into 1-2 critical components.
- Discuss trade-offs explicitly (e.g., consistency vs availability, SQL vs NoSQL).
- Address failure scenarios, monitoring, and how the system handles 10x traffic spikes.
Possible Follow-up Questions
- How would you implement rate limiting to protect the system?
- How would you optimize costs as the system scales?
- How would you migrate from a monolithic to a microservices architecture?
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Requirements
- Functional Requirements:
- Process buy and sell orders for cryptocurrencies in real time.
- Support order types: market, limit, and stop-loss.
- Provide order status updates and noti...
Capacity Estimation
Assuming Coinbase processes 10 million orders daily:
- Total Orders per Day: 10,000,000
- Peak Orders per Second:
- Average: 10,000,000 orders / 86,400 seconds = ~115 orders per seco...
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