Code Room
System designHardsd-g375
Subject IdempotencyLevel Senior–Staff~45 minCommon in Networking & APIs interviewsIndustries Technology, Software development

Question

Design a PaymentIntent object that models the full lifecycle of a single payment (created → requires_action → processing → succeeded/failed) and stays correct under aggressive client and network retries. The same client may call `confirm` 5 times because of timeouts, a webhook from the bank may arrive before the synchronous response, and a `cancel` can race a late `authorize`. ~30,000 confirms/sec at peak. Requirement: a given PaymentIntent must never result in two authorizations or a charge after a successful cancel, and every API call must be safely replayable. How do you model the state, transitions, and concurrency control so the object is the single source of truth?

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.

Narrate your design
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Run or narrate your approach, then ask the coach.