Design Stripe Connect
Last updated: December 29, 2025
Quick Overview
Design the architecture for Stripe Connect. Cover scalability, data storage, caching, and real-time requirements.
Stripe
December 29, 2025124
5
341 solved
Design the architecture for Stripe Connect. Cover scalability, data storage, caching, and real-time requirements.
System design interviews at Stripe 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
- Drive the design discussion proactively with minimal interviewer guidance
- Perform detailed capacity estimation and use it to inform design decisions
- Design for global scale with multi-region deployment and data consistency
- Deep dive into 2-3 critical components with implementation-level detail
- Address complex trade-offs: CAP theorem, eventual consistency, conflict resolution
- Discuss operational excellence: deployment strategy, chaos engineering, SLOs/SLIs
- Propose a phased rollout plan from MVP to full-scale system
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 implement rate limiting to protect the system?
- How would you handle schema migrations with zero downtime?
- How would you handle a 10x increase in traffic overnight?
- How would you optimize costs as the system scales?
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Requirements
Functional Requirements
- User Onboarding: Allow users to create accounts and link their bank accounts securely.
- Payment Processing: Facilitate transactions between connected accounts,...
Capacity Estimation
Assuming Stripe Connect aims to support 10 million connected accounts globally:
- Daily Transactions: If each account generates an average of 10 transactions per day, that results in 100 million t...
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