Design a Order Processing for Morgan Stanley
Last updated: December 9, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a event-driven order processing system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Morgan Stanley
December 9, 20251
6
4,535 solved
Design a event-driven order processing system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
System design interviews at Morgan Stanley typically last 45-60 minutes. You are expected to drive the conversation, starting from requirements gathering through to a detailed architecture. The interviewer will evaluate your ability to handle ambiguity and make practical engineering decisions.
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
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 handle a region-wide outage?
- How would you handle a 10x increase in traffic overnight?
- How would you handle schema migrations with zero downtime?
- What happens if one of your database nodes goes down?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- Order Creation: Users can place buy/sell orders for stocks, ETFs, and other financial instruments.
- Order Status Tracking: Users can track the status of their ...
Capacity Estimation
To estimate capacity:
- Daily Orders: Assume Morgan Stanley handles 10 million orders per day.
- Peak Load: During peak trading hours, assume 50% of daily orders occur in 4 hours (10 million o...
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