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Meta·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture·Senior

SeniorPrefer not to say
Jul 2026

Summary

Got a system design question for a Meta EM loop that had nothing to do with Meta's own products, which threw me a bit. The prompt was about building fraud detection for Stripe, so you're basically designing infrastructure for a payments company while sitting in a Meta interview.

Questions Asked (1)

Q1

Design a fraud detection system for a payments platform like Stripe.

System DesignTechnical Trade-offsProduct Analytics & Metrics
Author's notes

I went in expecting something Meta-flavored and completely underestimated how deep the payments domain knowledge would matter here.

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AI HintsAI Generated

Suggested Approach

Start by clarifying requirements and scale, then design a layered system with real-time scoring and offline analysis. Focus on trade-offs between latency, accuracy, and cost, and explain how you'd measure success with metrics like precision/recall and fraud loss rate.

Pro tip: Emphasize that fraud detection is an adversarial problem: attackers adapt, so you need continuous monitoring, feedback loops, and the ability to quickly deploy new rules/models without downtime.

1. Clarify Requirements and Scale

Ask about transaction volume, latency requirements, fraud types, and business impact. Establish metrics like false positive rate and detection rate.

2. High-Level Architecture

Propose a streaming pipeline for real-time scoring and a batch pipeline for model training and historical analysis. Include data stores, feature engineering, and decision engine.

3. Real-Time Scoring and Rules

Design how to evaluate transactions in <100ms using a combination of rules, ML models, and velocity checks. Discuss feature computation and caching.

4. Model Training and Feedback Loop

Explain how to train models on labeled data, handle imbalanced classes, and incorporate analyst feedback and chargebacks to continuously improve.

5. Monitoring, Metrics, and Iteration

Define key metrics (precision, recall, F1, fraud loss, false positive rate) and describe dashboards, alerting, and A/B testing for new models.

Key Points to Mention

  • Real-time vs batch processing trade-offs (latency vs accuracy)
  • Feature engineering: velocity, geolocation, device fingerprinting, historical behavior
  • Handling class imbalance and concept drift in ML models
  • Rules engine for quick adaptation and explainability
  • Feedback loops from manual review and chargebacks
  • Scalability and fault tolerance (e.g., Kafka, Flink, Redis)

AI-generated suggestions, not part of the candidate's original notes. May be inaccurate — verify before relying on them.