Design a charity donation platform
Company: Lyft
Role: Software Engineer
Category: System Design
Difficulty: medium
Interview Round: Onsite
Design a charity donation website where donors can browse campaigns and make one-time donations. Payment execution is handled through an external payment SDK, but the system must still ensure that donations are not lost, duplicated, or recorded with the wrong amount. The interviewer is especially interested in how you would handle payment failures, retries, partial outages, and sudden traffic spikes during major fundraising events. Discuss the core components, data model, request flow, failure handling, and scaling strategy.
Quick Answer: This question evaluates system design skills for building reliable, payment-integrated web services, focusing on reliability, fault tolerance, data modeling, request flow, and scalability in the context of donation transactions.