Code RoomExactly-once payment events
HardPrep Room Coding #3246

Exactly-once payment events

System designNetworking & APIsSenior–Staff~50 min

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
0:00
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