Design a Video Streaming for Stripe
Last updated: December 14, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a fault-tolerant video streaming system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Stripe
December 14, 20255
6
3,248 solved
Design a fault-tolerant video streaming 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 Stripe. 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. Stripe 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
- What happens if one of your database nodes goes down?
- How would you handle a region-wide outage?
- How would you handle schema migrations with zero downtime?
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Requirements
- Functional Requirements:
- User Authentication: Secure user login and management for content access.
- Video Uploading: Users can upload videos in various formats.
- **Vid...
Capacity Estimation
- User Base: Assume 10 million active users.
- Concurrent Users: Estimated 1 million concurrent users during peak times, with an average of 50% of users streaming videos.
- **Video Length:...
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