Design Payment Infrastructure for global users
Last updated: February 4, 2026
Quick Overview
Design a event-driven payment system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
Figma
System Design
Product Manager
Figma
February 4, 2026Product Manager
Technical Screen
System Design
Medium
23
3
4,679 solved
Design a event-driven payment system that handles millions of requests. Discuss trade-offs in consistency, availability, and performance.
System design interviews at Figma 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
Security and authentication
API design and rate limiting
Database selection and data modeling
High-level architecture and component design
Caching strategies (local, distributed, CDN)
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 10x increase in traffic overnight?
- How do you ensure data consistency across multiple services?
- What happens if one of your database nodes goes down?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements:
- User Registration & Authentication: Users must be able to register and authenticate securely.
- Payment Processing: Handle various payment methods (credit card...
Capacity Estimation
Back-of-Envelope Calculations:
- Assumptions:
- Figma has approximately 1 million active users globally.
- Each user generates about 5 payment requests per month.
- Peak traffic is expec...
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