May 7, 2026

Design Robinhood

Interview notes for live stock pricing, order lifecycle management, exchange connectivity, and low-latency fan-out.

The Problem

This is really two systems: a live market-data fan-out system and a high-consistency order management system.

Requirements

  • See live prices
  • Create and cancel orders

Core Entities

  • User
  • Symbol
  • Order

Live Prices

One exchange feed should be multiplexed to many users through a streaming layer and a pub/sub fan-out path.

SSE is a strong fit for one-way price updates.

Orders

Order placement should be stored durably before it is sent outward. That avoids losing the intent if a downstream call fails.

Exchange Connectivity

Keep exchange connections centralized and fixed. The service should not open a separate long-lived connection from every instance.

Final Shape

The clean interview answer is: stream market data through a shared fan-out layer, keep order state strongly consistent, and separate internal order records from exchange identifiers.