•SYSTEM DESIGN
Visa System Design Questions
Every system design problem candidates reported at Visa between September 2025 and September 2026, most-asked first. Each one links to a full solution.
Problems
4
Candidate reports
4
Asked more than once
—
all reported once
Question type
4 HLD
Design E-Commerce Tables and Indexes for Recent-Spend Queries
Design normalized relational tables for an e-commerce system (users, products, orders, order line items) that preserve the price actually charged at purchase time even when product prices change later, and enforce integrity…
Payment system: states, payment methods, durable execution, retries
Design a payment processing system (like Stripe's core) that handles about 10,000 transactions per second between merchants and external payment providers. Support the full lifecycle: authorization (place a hold on funds with low…
Design a notification system
Design a multi-channel notification service (push, email, SMS, in-app) that other services call to notify users. It must accept sudden bursts of millions of notifications with low acknowledgement latency, persist them durably,…
Re-architect your current project for planet scale
Walk through the architecture of a real project you built, end to end: the trigger, components and interfaces, data ownership and storage, deployment, failure handling and your personal contributions. Then redesign it to work at…
Duplicate reports of the same problem are merged and counted.
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What system design questions does Visa ask?
Candidates reported 4 distinct system design problems at Visa between September 2025 and September 2026, including Design E-Commerce Tables and Indexes for Recent-Spend Queries, Payment system: states, payment methods, durable execution, retries, Design a notification system.
How to prepare for Visa system design interview?
Start with the Visa problems reported most often, work through each full solution, then practice explaining a design end to end under time pressure in a mock interview.
What is the difference between HLD and LLD at Visa?
HLD (High-Level Design) focuses on system architecture, scalability, and component interactions. LLD (Low-Level Design) dives into class diagrams, API contracts, and database schemas. Visa tests both.