Atlassian Senior Software Engineer Interview Questions

1.Tell me about a recent side project or experiment you built and shipped quickly, maybe over a weekend or in your spare time. What was it and how did you validate whether it was worth pursuing?

2.Tell me about a time when you had to drive alignment on a technical decision with team members across multiple offices or time zones. What was the disagreement and how did you resolve it asynchronously?

3.Walk me through a recent project where you had to coordinate work across team members in different time zones. How did you handle communication and keep everyone aligned?

4.Describe a team practice, ritual, or process you introduced that meaningfully improved how your team worked together. What problem were you trying to solve and what was the outcome?

5.Tell me about a time when using a product you were building led you to discover a significant user experience issue. How did you identify it and what did you do about it?

6.Describe the most ambitious technical experiment or prototype you built in a short timeframe - maybe for a hackathon or to test a hypothesis. What corners did you cut to ship fast, and what did you learn?

7.Write a function that determines if a user has permission to view a Jira issue, given that permissions can be inherited from projects, issue security levels, and user groups.

8.Code a function that merges two sorted arrays of Bitbucket pull request reviews, where each review has a timestamp and author. The result should be sorted by timestamp.

9.We're seeing intermittent 500 errors from our Jira issue search API that serves millions of queries daily. The errors spike during business hours but don't correlate with deploy times. Walk me through your debugging approach.

10.Design the database schema and API structure for Trello's card commenting system, considering that some boards have thousands of cards with hundreds of comments each.

11.You're working on a Confluence page that needs to handle real-time collaborative editing for thousands of concurrent users. How would you design the conflict resolution when multiple people edit the same paragraph simultaneously?

12.You're implementing Atlassian Intelligence's document summarization feature for Confluence. The ML model API has a 30-second timeout and occasionally fails. How do you design a resilient system that handles millions of summarization requests?

13.Design a notification system for Jira that can handle 10 million issue updates per hour while ensuring users only get notified about changes they actually care about. How do you prevent notification fatigue?

14.You're designing the backend for Trello's new board templates marketplace where teams can share and discover workflow templates. How do you build this to handle viral templates that might get copied thousands of times in a day?

15.You're building Confluence's page export feature that needs to convert wiki markup to PDF for pages with thousands of embedded images and videos. How do you design this to handle enterprise customers exporting entire spaces?

16.Design the backend for Loom's video processing pipeline that needs to generate thumbnails, transcripts, and multiple quality versions for millions of videos uploaded daily across different regions.

17.Build the architecture for Bitbucket's merge conflict resolution system that helps developers resolve conflicts in pull requests with large codebases. Consider that some repos have 100,000+ files and complex branching strategies.

18.Design the data consistency system for Atlassian Intelligence when it's summarizing content across Jira, Confluence, and Trello simultaneously for a customer's quarterly business review. How do you ensure the AI sees up-to-date data across all products?

19.Tell me about a time you had to publicly admit you were wrong about a technical decision or approach. How did you handle it?

20.Describe a time when you saw something broken in your engineering organization and took initiative to fix it, even though it wasn't your direct responsibility.

21.Tell me about a time you had to deliver difficult feedback to a peer or someone more senior than you. What made it difficult and how did you approach it?

22.Walk me through a time when you had to make a tradeoff between shipping something fast and ensuring long-term code quality. How did you navigate that with your team?

23.Describe a time when you had to convince a skeptical stakeholder to adopt a technical approach or tool you believed in. What was their main objection and how did you address it?

24.Tell me about a time you had to step in and help a struggling team member whose performance was affecting the whole team. How did you approach it without being their manager?

25.Estimate how many Jira issues are created globally per day across all Atlassian customers. Walk me through your reasoning and assumptions.

26.Estimate how much storage space Atlassian needs globally to handle all file attachments across Jira, Confluence, and Trello. Break down your reasoning.

27.You notice that Confluence page load times increased by 200ms over the past month, but no specific feature shipped that would explain it. How would you investigate this performance regression?

28.A major enterprise customer reports that their Confluence search is returning stale results - content updated yesterday isn't appearing in searches. How would you diagnose and prioritize this issue?

29.Estimate the revenue impact if Atlassian reduced Jira's average page load time by 1 second. What assumptions would you make and how would you calculate this?

30.You're analyzing why Trello's mobile app retention dropped 15% in a specific geographic region while staying flat globally. Walk me through how you'd investigate this regional anomaly.