High-Level Design rounds at Paytm lean toward real fintech-scale problems — risk/fraud scoring, booking-style concurrency, and database schema trade-offs — rather than generic textbook prompts. Interviewers reward a structured approach: requirements first, then schema and data model, then how the design holds up under load.
Problem 1Design a Risk Management Service
Design a service that scores and manages fraud/risk for transactions flowing through a payments platform, at a scale where the database schema and query patterns become the main bottleneck.
- Cover the service architecture for risk scoring at transaction time.
- Cover the database schema choices and how you'd optimize queries as transaction volume grows.
- Be ready to defend schema and indexing trade-offs under follow-up pressure — this is reported as the toughest part of the round.
More system design prompts Paytm has asked recently
The full architecture, schema design and scaling discussion for these are part of the Placement-Ready PYQ Kit.
1 more system design prompt with a full architecture writeup in the full Placement-Ready PYQ Kit