System designHardsd-g379

Subject PaymentsLevel Senior–Staff~45 minCommon in Distributed systems interviewsIndustries Technology, Software development

Question

Design split/escrow payments for a marketplace: a single buyer charge of $X must be split among multiple sellers, the platform fee, taxes, and held in escrow until each seller's portion is releasable (e.g. on delivery confirmation, possibly at different times per seller). ~3,000 orders/sec, each splitting across 1–10 sellers. Funds held in escrow must always equal sum of pending releases, and a refund before release must claw back from the right seller's pending amount. How do you model the money so it always balances?

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.

Learn the concepts

Narrate your design

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Run or narrate your approach, then ask the coach.