{"podcast":{"title":"Software Engineer Interview Prep Podcast","slug":"software-engineer-interview-prep-podcast-7756520","podcast_index_feed_id":7756520,"rss_url":"https://anchor.fm/s/10f2c0f8c/podcast/rss","website_url":"https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/prabuddha-ganegoda","image_url":"https://d3t3ozftmdmh3i.cloudfront.net/staging/podcast_uploaded_nologo/45395131/45395131-1771326099446-dba64f511934f.jpg","author":"Prabuddha Ganegoda","episode_count":35,"summary":"Ace your Software Engineer interviews with confidence. This podcast helps you organize your thinking, strengthen problem-solving skills, and prepare effectively for real technical interviews. Topics covered include: Programming (Java & Python) Data Structures & Algorithms System Design AI for Software Engineers Interview strategies & mindset Whether you're targeting Big Tech, startups, or senior engineering roles, each episode helps you think clearly, solve better, and perform at your best.","last_synced_at":"2026-06-09T02:20:02.878789+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/software-engineer-interview-prep-podcast-7756520"},"episode":{"title":"System Design Interview: Payment Settlement Batch Processing","slug":"system-design-interview-payment-settlement-batch-processing","published_at":"2026-05-17T11:45:50+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/software-engineer-interview-prep-podcast-7756520/system-design-interview-payment-settlement-batch-processing","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/software-engineer-interview-prep-podcast-7756520","url":"https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/prabuddha-ganegoda/episodes/System-Design-Interview-Payment-Settlement-Batch-Processing-e3jg0dr","audio_url":"https://anchor.fm/s/10f2c0f8c/podcast/play/120110971/https%3A%2F%2Fd3ctxlq1ktw2nl.cloudfront.net%2Fstaging%2F2026-4-17%2F424314545-44100-2-580e05915292d.mp3","summary":"Design a batch processing system for end-of-day payment settlement at a payments company that processes 50 million transactions per day . The system must net merchant positions, calculate fees, and initiate fund transfers to merchant bank accounts within a strict bank cutoff window. Walk me through your design, covering reliability, scalability, and how you'd handle failures. Key Takeaways The outbox pattern is the canonical solution to the dual-write problem. Know it cold. Partition keys define ordering and parallelism — choose with intention, usually around the natural aggregation boundary (here, merchant ID). Throttling must be distributed when you have multiple workers — Redis-backed buckets or a sidecar. Idempotency is non-negotiable in payments. Design for at-least-once and dedupe. Retries are tiered : in-process for transient, delay-queue for slower-resolving, DLQ for terminal. Backpressure beats dropping — use Kafka lag as your buffer when downstream is slow. Reconciliation closes the loop — you don't know it worked until ground truth confirms. Corrections are new events — never rewrite history in a financial system.","meta_description":"Design a batch processing system for end-of-day payment settlement at a payments company that processes 50 million transactions per day . The system must…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":571,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/software-engineer-interview-prep-podcast-7756520/episodes/system-design-interview-payment-settlement-batch-processing/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/software-engineer-interview-prep-podcast-7756520/system-design-interview-payment-settlement-batch-processing.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}