Build a Saga Orchestrator for Cross-Border Payment Creation
Overview
What this challenge is about.
Model a payment-creation saga with six compensations, handle exchange-rate shifts and idempotent reversals, and earn your verifiable certificate.
The scenario
The company processes cross-border payments for small and medium businesses across the Asia-Pacific region and Europe, where each payment must clear compliance, sanctions, and live currency-conversion checks before money moves. At their scale a single mis-sequenced or half-finished payment becomes a manual reconciliation ticket and a regulatory exposure.
The Brief
What you'll do, and what you'll demonstrate.
Replace a fragile six-service distributed transaction with a saga orchestrator that handles twelve named failure scenarios through automated compensation, leaving no payment in a state that requires manual reconciliation.
Earning criteria — what you'll demonstrate
- Decompose a multi-service distributed transaction into a saga with a correct compensation for every forward step.
- Reason about and defend orchestration versus choreography against concrete domain constraints such as a rate-lock window and ordering requirements.
- Design compensations that remain correct under duplicate and out-of-order execution (idempotency).
- Validate failure handling systematically through chaos testing of named, reproducible scenarios.
- Write operational documentation that lets a non-author recover a stuck workflow unaided.
Program Fit
Where this fits in your program.
Sharpens the same skills your degree expects you to demonstrate.
Aligned coursework coming soon.
Skills
Skills you'll demonstrate.
Each one shows up on your verified credential.
- Saga Pattern
Apply saga pattern to solve real industry problems and demonstrate production-level capability.
- Temporal Workflow
Apply temporal workflow to solve real industry problems and demonstrate production-level capability.
- Compensation Logic
Apply compensation logic to solve real industry problems and demonstrate production-level capability.
- Idempotency
Apply idempotency to solve real industry problems and demonstrate production-level capability.
- Chaos Testing
Apply chaos testing to solve real industry problems and demonstrate production-level capability.
- Kafka
Apply kafka to solve real industry problems and demonstrate production-level capability.
Careers
Career paths this challenge builds toward
Completing this challenge demonstrates skills that transfer directly to these roles:
Backend Engineer, Payments Platform
Payment platforms are built on flows that must never leave money half-moved. Designing and proving a compensating saga here directly mirrors the core daily work of keeping multi-service money movement consistent under partial failure.
This challenge sharpens
- saga-pattern
- compensation-logic
- idempotency
Distributed Systems Engineer
Cross-service consistency without two-phase commit is a defining distributed-systems problem. This challenge builds the judgment to choose orchestration versus choreography and to validate resilience through reproducible failure injection.
This challenge sharpens
- saga-pattern
- temporal-workflow
- chaos-testing
Site Reliability Engineer
Reliability work lives at the intersection of failure modes and recovery procedures. Producing chaos tests and an operator runbook that lets on-call recover stuck workflows unaided is exactly the discipline reliability teams hire for.
This challenge sharpens
- chaos-testing
- idempotency
- compensation-logic