Design a Rate Limiting for Stripe
Last updated: January 17, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a event-driven rate limiting system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Stripe
January 17, 202625
15
363 solved
Design a event-driven rate limiting system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Stripe asks this during the System Design Round to assess your architectural thinking. They want to see how you decompose a complex problem, choose appropriate technologies, and reason about failure modes. Strong candidates proactively discuss monitoring, alerting, and operational concerns.
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
- What monitoring and alerting would you set up on day one?
- What happens if one of your database nodes goes down?
- How do you ensure data consistency across multiple services?
- How would you handle a 10x increase in traffic overnight?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements:
- Rate Limit Policies: Ability to define rate limits per API endpoint based on user type (e.g., individual, business) and usage patterns.
- Dynamic Configuration...
Capacity Estimation
Assuming Stripe processes 10 billion API requests per day:
- Requests per second = 10 billion / (24 * 60 * 60) ≈ 115,740 requests per second.
- If we assume a rate limit of 100 requests per second...
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