Exactly-once payment events
Design exactly-once processing for a payment-events pipeline where an upstream service emits 'payment.captured' events to Kafka and a downstream consumer must, per event, post to the ledger and send one receipt email — each side effect exactly once, despite Kafka's at-least-once delivery, consumer crashes, and rebalances that replay messages. ~25,000 events/sec. Describe how the producer avoids losing/duplicating events and how the consumer achieves exactly-once side effects.
What a strong answer looks like
Clarify scale and constraints first. Propose a clean component breakdown, then go deep on the hard parts (data model, bottlenecks, consistency, failure modes) and name the trade-offs you are making.
Clarify5:30 left
Estimate5:30 planned
Design16:30 planned
Deep dive13:30 planned
Failure9:00 planned
Which questions mattered is sealed until you submit. Telling you now would just be handing over the edge cases.
Run or narrate your approach, then ask the coach.