Design a Visa-like payment processing system

Q: Design a Visa-like payment processing system

This is a System Design interview question from Databricks for Software Engineer roles. View the full question and solution on PracHub.

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Question

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System Design Prompt

Design a card payment processing system similar to a Visa/Mastercard network.

The system should support:

Card-present and card-not-present transactions
Authorization (approve/decline), capture/settlement, refunds, and reversals
High availability and low latency for authorization
Exactly-once/at-most-once semantics where appropriate (no double-charging)
Idempotency and retries across unreliable networks
Auditability, reconciliation, and dispute/chargeback workflows (high level)
Compliance considerations (PCI, encryption, key management)

What to cover

Requirements (functional + non-functional) and assumptions
High-level architecture and core services
APIs/events and data models (high level)
Consistency, idempotency, ordering, and failure handling
Storage choices, scaling, partitioning
Observability, security, fraud hooks
Capacity estimates (rough) and bottlenecks

Design a Visa-like payment processing system

System Design Prompt

What to cover

Solution

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