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 form and operate a company so they can access banking, payments, billing, and global commerce infrastructure. In this interview, you are asked to design the high-level system for a new scalable Atlas feature serving international sellers who want to set up a business entity, complete required verification, and become ready to sell across borders using Stripe.

Focus on the technical product architecture and product trade-offs behind supporting sellers from many countries, with different identity documents, tax requirements, business structures, compliance obligations, payment needs, and operational expectations. The feature should work reliably for a high-volume, globally distributed user base while preserving a strong developer-grade experience and financial trust.

You do not need to produce low-level code or database schemas, but you should be able to define the core user workflow, major system components, data flows, integrations, APIs, reliability expectations, security/privacy considerations, rollout approach, and operational risks.

The experience should consider:

- The end-to-end seller journey from discovery and eligibility checks through application, verification, entity setup, payment readiness, and post-launch support.

- Core product requirements for international sellers, including localization, document collection, KYC/KYB, tax/business information, compliance status, and progress visibility.

- High-level APIs, services, data models, and third-party integrations needed to support incorporation, identity verification, payments onboarding, notifications, and support workflows.

- Reliability, scalability, latency, and failure-handling expectations for a financial infrastructure product used across countries and time zones.

- Privacy, security, data residency, auditability, fraud prevention, and regulatory compliance considerations when handling sensitive personal and business data.

- Observability needs, including system health, funnel drop-offs, verification failures, SLA breaches, manual review queues, and merchant activation metrics.

- Rollout and migration considerations, including country-by-country launch, feature flags, experimentation, support readiness, rollback plans, and dependency management.

- Product trade-offs between automation and manual review, global consistency and local compliance, fast onboarding and risk controls, and flexibility versus operational complexity.

The goal is to demonstrate how you would structure a technically sound, scalable, and compliant product system for Stripe Atlas that enables international sellers to start and grow their businesses while maintaining Stripe’s standards for trust, reliability, and global financial infrastructure.