Design the high-level system for a scalable Atlas feature used by international sellers

Problem Statement Description

Product context: Stripe is financial infrastructure for internet businesses; its products include payments, Checkout, Billing, Connect, Radar, Issuing, Terminal, and tax tools.

Stripe Atlas helps entrepreneurs and businesses outside the U.S. set up and operate the financial and legal foundation they need to sell globally. In this interview, you are asked to design the high-level system for a new or expanded Atlas feature that must serve international sellers at scale, while fitting into Stripe’s broader payments, billing, compliance, and merchant-growth ecosystem.

Assume the users are sellers or founders in multiple countries who may need onboarding guidance, identity and business verification, jurisdiction-specific compliance steps, document collection, tax or banking setup, and integration with Stripe products. The system should support a reliable user journey across geographies, languages, regulations, and partner dependencies without creating unnecessary operational burden.

Focus on the technical product architecture and product trade-offs rather than detailed code. You should clarify the feature scope, define the major system components, explain data flows and APIs, and reason about reliability, security, privacy, compliance, observability, and rollout risks.

The experience should consider:

- Core user requirements for international sellers, including onboarding, eligibility, document submission, status tracking, and support handoffs

- External and internal integrations, such as identity verification, compliance checks, payments, billing, banking, tax, CRM, and support systems

- Data model and API needs for seller profiles, country-specific requirements, application state, documents, audit trails, and notifications

- Reliability expectations, including failure modes, retry behavior, partner outages, idempotency, and user-visible status accuracy

- Privacy, security, and compliance constraints for sensitive business, personal, financial, and jurisdiction-specific data

- Scalability across countries, seller segments, currencies, languages, and changing regulatory rules

- Observability and operational tooling for monitoring funnel drop-offs, processing delays, verification failures, and support escalations

- Rollout approach, including phased country launches, experimentation, migration from existing flows, and rollback or fallback plans

Your goal is to present a clear high-level system design that balances seller experience, developer and operator usability, global compliance, financial reliability, and Stripe’s need to scale Atlas across diverse international markets.