Design Order Processing Infrastructure for microservices
Last updated: December 26, 2025
Quick Overview
Design a fault-tolerant order processing system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Morgan Stanley
December 26, 202585
3
4,227 solved
Design a fault-tolerant order processing system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Morgan Stanley asks this during the Technical Screen to assess your depth in software engineering. They want to see understanding of design patterns, system architecture, and the trade-offs involved in different technical approaches.
What the Interviewer Expects
- Apply engineering principles to a realistic design scenario
- Discuss trade-offs between different approaches with concrete examples
- Demonstrate understanding of testability, maintainability, and extensibility
- Connect theoretical concepts to production engineering practices
- Discuss how the approach scales with team and codebase size
Key Topics to Cover
How to Approach This
- Apply SOLID principles. Single Responsibility makes code testable, Open/Closed makes it extensible.
- Choose data structures based on access patterns, not familiarity.
- Prefer immutable data and message passing over shared mutable state for concurrency.
- Design APIs with RESTful conventions, versioning, meaningful errors, and pagination from day one.
Possible Follow-up Questions
- How would you document this for other engineers?
- What testing strategy would you use for this component?
- How would this design change if the team size doubled?
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Core Design Principles
For the order processing system at Morgan Stanley, we will apply the SOLID principles to ensure that our system is modular, maintainable, and extensible:
- Single Responsibility Principle: E...
Architecture
The architecture will follow a microservices approach, where each service is responsible for a part of the order processing workflow. The key services include:
- Order Service: Handles the c...
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