Jack has provided the following feedback on your session:
Rafael demonstrated strong clarity and initiative in breaking down the system design for a payment platform. The session covered key aspects including requirements, API design, high-level components, and scalability strategies.
Areas of strength included:
- Quickly enumerated core functional and non-functional requirements
- Clearly identified key entities and drew distinctions between Payment and Transaction
- Include payment settlement as a distinct functional requirement early on
- Completed a comprehensive API definition and began expanding entity schemas
- Initiated a meaningful deep dive into security topics, including tokenization strategies like iframe usage
- Considered idempotency with a composite deduplication key strategy
- Discussed scalability with sharding and CDC-based state syncing
Areas for improvement:
- Clarify durability guarantees (e.g., traceability of failed transactions, state recovery post-crash)
- Embrace more collaborative moments with your interviewer—for instance, naturally inferring steps like DB validation during payment creation
- Demonstrated some deep dive around data correctness guarantees — aim to confidently frame how at-least-once delivery + deduplication = exactly-once semantics for hold, charge and settlement phases
Overall, Rafael shows great structure and promise in system design interviews. With additional work on durability, correctness, and deeper tradeoff thinking (especially in Staff+ topics like encryption, failure modes, and collaboration signals), they’ll be well-positioned for success in senior-level interviews.