Design a scalable Payment System
Last updated: October 31, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a scalable payment system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Figma
October 31, 2025382
10
1,056 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 Technical Screen 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
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 optimize costs as the system scales?
- What monitoring and alerting would you set up on day one?
- How would you handle schema migrations with zero downtime?
- How would you handle a 10x increase in traffic overnight?
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Requirements
- Functional Requirements:
- Process payment transactions for Figma users, including one-time payments and subscriptions.
- Support multiple payment methods (credit cards, PayPal, etc.).
- P...
Capacity Estimation
- Estimated User Base: Assume 1 million active users with 10% performing transactions daily.
- Daily Transactions: 100,000 transactions per day (1,000,000 users * 10%).
- Peak Load: Assume...
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