Design an Order Fulfillment System
TeslaSoftware Engineer · Onsite
Last updated
Design an order-fulfillment system and explain its major components, data flow, and reliability trade-offs.
Design an Order Fulfillment System
Design the backend flow that takes an accepted customer order through inventory reservation, payment, warehouse processing, shipment, and completion. Explain state transitions, service boundaries, failure recovery, and how duplicate messages or retries are handled.
Constraints & Assumptions
- Inventory and payment are separate dependencies and cannot share one database transaction.
- Events may be duplicated, delayed, or delivered out of order.
- A customer must see an understandable authoritative order status.
Clarifying Questions to Ask
- When is inventory considered committed, and how long may a reservation live?
- Is payment authorized before picking or captured after shipment?
- Which partial-fulfillment, cancellation, and return behaviors are required?
Hints
Hint 1
Make the state machine explicit: Recovery is easier when every side effect is tied to a durable transition with a clear retry rule.
Follow-up questions
- How would you prevent overselling a scarce item?
- How would split shipments change the data model?
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