Build a scalable Payment Pipeline
Last updated: February 20, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a scalable payment system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Figma
System Design
Software Engineer
Figma
February 20, 2026Software Engineer
Onsite
System Design
Medium
6
13
1,973 solved
Design a scalable payment system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
This is a common system design question asked during Onsite at Figma. 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. Figma values engineers who can think about scalability from day one.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Systematically gather requirements and estimate capacity (QPS, storage, bandwidth)
- Design a scalable architecture with clear component responsibilities
- Make well-reasoned database and caching decisions with trade-off analysis
- Address consistency vs availability trade-offs specific to the use case
- Discuss partitioning strategy, replication, and data modeling
- Cover failure handling, monitoring, and alerting strategies
Key Topics to Cover
Database selection and data modeling
Caching strategies (local, distributed, CDN)
Consistency models and replication
Failure handling and fault tolerance
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?
- What happens if one of your database nodes goes down?
- How would you optimize costs as the system scales?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements:
- Payment Processing: Support credit card, debit card, and alternative payment methods (e.g., PayPal, Apple Pay).
- Multi-Currency Support: Handle transactions i...
Capacity Estimation
Back-of-Envelope Calculations:
- Expected Transactions: Assuming 1 million users, with an average of 10 transactions per month, the system would handle approximately 10 million transactions m...
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