Cross-shard transfers
Design account-to-account transfers in a banking core where accounts are sharded across many database partitions (by account id), and a single transfer can move money between two accounts on different shards. ~9,000 transfers/sec. The transfer must be atomic (both legs apply or neither), durable, and exactly-once under client retries. Describe how you make a cross-shard debit+credit atomic without a single global lock and how you handle a coordinator crash mid-transfer.
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.