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System design interview question

Design a real-time fraud detection system

Hard · System design (HLD) · Company tags: Stripe, PayPal, Amazon, PhonePe

The prompt

"Design real-time fraud detection for a payments platform. Every transaction must be scored and approved or declined within about 100 milliseconds, using signals about the card, the device, the merchant, and the user's history. Fraudsters adapt within days."

What this round really tests

low-latency feature computation on streaming data, plus the adversarial dynamics that distinguish fraud from ordinary ML systems. The distinguishing content is: a hard latency budget that rules out expensive lookups, the combination of rules and models, feedback labels that arrive weeks late, and the fact that your adversary responds to your defences.

Clarifying questions worth asking

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