Atlassian Engineering Manager Interview Questions

1.Tell me about a time you ran an experiment or prototype to test a new idea, and you had to get it shipped in a very short timeframe. What was the idea and how did you make it happen?

2.Tell me about a time you had to make a critical project decision when your distributed team members had conflicting opinions and you couldn't get everyone in the same room to hash it out.

3.Describe a project where you had to coordinate engineering work across multiple time zones with team members you rarely saw face-to-face. How did you ensure everyone stayed aligned?

4.Walk me through a team practice, process, or ritual you introduced that significantly improved how your team worked together. What problem were you solving and what was the outcome?

5.Tell me about a time you were a heavy user of a product your team built or maintained, and that usage led you to discover something important that needed to be fixed or improved.

6.Describe the most ambitious technical experiment you've championed where there was significant uncertainty about whether it would work. How did you approach the risk and what trade-offs did you make to ship something quickly?

7.During a ShipIt hackathon, you want to prototype an AI feature that suggests Jira issue assignments based on past activity. You have 24 hours. What's your technical approach?

8.You're reviewing a pull request where a developer hardcoded feature flag logic instead of using your feature flag service. The code works but violates team standards. How do you handle this in your review?

9.Your team owns a microservice that handles Jira issue updates, processing about 50,000 writes per second. You're seeing intermittent deadlocks in PostgreSQL that are causing user-visible errors. How would you debug and resolve this?

10.A product manager wants to add a feature that requires aggregating data across all Jira projects in a customer's instance. Your current architecture shards by project_id. What technical concerns would you raise and how would you approach this?

11.You're designing real-time collaborative editing for Confluence pages, similar to Google Docs. Multiple users need to edit the same document simultaneously without conflicts. Walk me through your technical approach.

12.Your team maintains Confluence's search service built on Elasticsearch. Search quality has degraded for large instances, and you're seeing complaints from enterprise customers. How would you systematically improve search relevance?

13.Design a notification system for Jira that can handle 100 million issue updates per day across 200,000 customer instances. Users should get real-time notifications on web, mobile, and email without overwhelming them.

14.Walk me through how you'd architect a real-time presence system for Confluence that shows who's currently viewing or editing a page. This needs to work for pages with thousands of concurrent viewers.

15.You're building a new analytics dashboard that aggregates data from Jira, Confluence, and Bitbucket to show team productivity metrics. How would you design the data pipeline and API layer?

16.Design the backend for Atlassian Intelligence's content summarization feature that works across Jira tickets, Confluence pages, and Loom videos. It needs to handle 10 million documents and growing.

17.Design a system to automatically migrate and sync data when customers merge two Jira instances after an acquisition. You need to handle conflicting project keys, user mappings, and custom field schemas.

18.Design the infrastructure for Loom's video processing pipeline that handles encoding, thumbnail generation, and transcription for 50 million videos per month. The system needs to support real-time processing for workplace communication.

19.Tell me about a time you had to deliver difficult news or transparent feedback to your team, especially when it might have been easier to sugarcoat the message. How did you approach it?

20.Describe a time when you noticed your team was burning out or working unsustainably. What specific changes did you make to restore balance while still meeting your commitments?

21.Tell me about a time you had to influence a senior engineering leader or principal engineer who disagreed with your team's technical direction. How did you build alignment without formal authority over them?

22.Walk me through a time when you inherited a team or took over a project where the previous approach wasn't working. What did you change in your first 60 days and how did you decide what to prioritize?

23.Describe a situation where you had to convince your engineering team to take on significant technical debt or make architectural compromises to meet a critical customer deadline. How did you maintain code quality standards while making these tradeoffs?

24.Tell me about the most significant process or cultural change you drove across multiple engineering teams. What resistance did you face and how did you build momentum for adoption?

25.Estimate how many Confluence page views Atlassian handles per day across all customer instances globally. Walk me through your assumptions and calculation approach.

26.Estimate how much revenue Atlassian loses annually due to customers downgrading from premium Jira plans to standard plans. Walk me through your framework for this calculation.

27.You notice that Jira issue creation latency has increased by 200ms over the past month, but no major features shipped and there were no incidents. How would you systematically investigate this performance regression?

28.Your team's on-call rotation is getting 15 pages per week for the same recurring issue that takes 2 hours to manually resolve each time. The permanent fix would take 6 weeks of engineering time. How do you decide whether to prioritize this work?

29.Estimate the annual cost impact if we reduced Trello board load times by 500ms. Consider both customer retention and infrastructure costs in your analysis.

30.Atlassian's customer base grows 25% year-over-year, but your team's incident response time has increased from 30 minutes to 2 hours over the same period. Diagnose what's happening and propose a systematic solution.