Design the high-level system for a scalable Connect 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 Connect enables platforms and marketplaces to onboard sellers, route payments, manage payouts, and handle compliance across many countries. In this interview, you are asked to design a high-level system for a scalable Connect feature serving international sellers who may operate in different currencies, jurisdictions, tax regimes, payout methods, and risk profiles.

Focus on the product and technical requirements a Technical PM should clarify before aligning engineering, risk, compliance, and operations teams. The experience should account for sellers joining through platforms, completing verification, accepting cross-border payments, receiving payouts, handling disputes, and staying compliant as they grow into new markets.

You are not expected to design every low-level component or write code. The expected scope is a structured high-level system design that explains core user flows, data needs, APIs, reliability expectations, compliance constraints, operational risks, and rollout considerations for a global financial infrastructure product.

The experience should consider:

- Seller onboarding and identity/business verification across countries, including localized requirements and failure states.

- Platform-facing APIs, webhooks, dashboards, and documentation needed for a strong developer experience.

- Payment acceptance, currency conversion, payout scheduling, settlement, refunds, disputes, and reconciliation workflows.

- Data models and system boundaries for accounts, capabilities, balances, transactions, compliance status, and risk signals.

- Reliability, latency, idempotency, observability, and incident handling for money movement at global scale.

- Privacy, security, fraud prevention, sanctions screening, and regional regulatory constraints.

- Rollout strategy by market, seller segment, platform type, and payment method, including migration and backward compatibility.

- Product trade-offs between conversion, compliance strictness, operational complexity, cost, and seller/platform trust.

The goal is to demonstrate how you would define and communicate a scalable, compliant, and developer-friendly system direction for Stripe Connect in an international seller context, while making clear assumptions, identifying risks, and balancing product outcomes with financial infrastructure constraints.