Atlassian Software Engineer Interview Questions

1.Describe a time you noticed your team was struggling with something and you introduced a new practice or process to fix it. What was the problem and how did you get buy-in for the change?

2.Walk me through the most recent side project or experiment you built outside of work requirements. What drove you to build it, and what did you learn from shipping it?

3.Tell me about the last time you built and shipped a prototype or experiment in under 48 hours. What was it, how did you validate the idea, and what happened next?

4.Tell me about a time you were using a product or tool heavily and discovered a significant issue or improvement opportunity. How did you turn that insight into action?

5.Walk me through a project you led with team members across multiple time zones. How did you keep everyone aligned and productive when you couldn't just call a meeting?

6.Describe the most challenging distributed team project you've worked on. What made it challenging, and how did you ensure the project succeeded despite those challenges?

7.Write a function that takes a Confluence page's content and returns all @mentions of users and teams, handling both display names and usernames correctly.

8.Implement a simple cache decorator in Python that can be used across our microservices. It should support TTL, handle cache misses gracefully, and work with Redis as the backend.

9.You're working on a Confluence page editor feature where users can collaborate in real-time. How would you handle conflicting edits when two users modify the same paragraph simultaneously?

10.You need to implement a notification system that sends updates to users when someone comments on their Jira issue. The system should handle millions of notifications per day with delivery guarantees.

11.Our Jira API serves millions of requests daily. A customer reports that loading their project dashboard takes 30 seconds, but our P95 latency is under 500ms. How would you debug this?

12.Design a feature flag system for Atlassian's microservices architecture that can handle gradual rollouts and instant rollbacks across our global infrastructure.

13.How would you design Bitbucket's pull request merge queue to handle thousands of concurrent PRs while ensuring that only passing builds get merged and the main branch stays green?

14.Design the analytics system for Atlassian Intelligence that tracks AI feature usage across Jira, Confluence, and Trello while respecting customer privacy and providing insights for product teams. How do you handle the scale of billions of AI interactions?

15.How would you design Loom's video processing pipeline to handle encoding, thumbnail generation, and AI transcription for 10 million videos uploaded daily while keeping costs reasonable?

16.Design the search infrastructure for Confluence that can index and search across 50 million pages while supporting real-time updates and complex permission filtering. How do you ensure search results respect Atlassian's space and page permissions?

17.How would you design Confluence's page editor to handle real-time collaboration with strong consistency guarantees, knowing that some of our enterprise customers have 500+ people editing the same page simultaneously?

18.Design a system to automatically sync Jira issue data across multiple Atlassian instances when large enterprises use our Data Center product in different regions. How do you handle schema mismatches and ensure data consistency?

19.Tell me about a time you disagreed with a technical decision from someone more senior than you. How did you handle the disagreement?

20.Describe a time when you took initiative to improve something on your team without being asked. What was broken and how did you fix it?

21.Tell me about a time you had to deliver difficult feedback to a peer who wasn't receptive to it. How did you approach that conversation?

22.Walk me through a time when you influenced a group of peers to adopt a technical approach or tool that you believed in. What was your strategy?

23.Tell me about a time when you had to balance shipping something quickly for customers versus taking time to build it properly. How did you make that tradeoff decision?

24.Describe a situation where you had to coordinate work across multiple teams who had different priorities than yours. How did you align everyone toward a common goal?

25.Jira Cloud serves over 200,000 customers worldwide. Estimate how many database queries we execute per day across all customer instances, and walk me through your reasoning.

26.Estimate the total storage costs for Atlassian if every Confluence page had automatic version history kept forever. What would be the main cost drivers, and how would you optimize this?

27.Our Confluence search results suddenly started returning outdated content for 15% of queries, even though the content was recently updated. No code deployments happened. How would you debug this?

28.Estimate how much revenue Atlassian would lose if Jira was down for exactly 2 hours during peak business hours globally. Walk me through your calculation.

29.Design an A/B testing framework for Trello that can handle experiments across web, mobile, and desktop apps while ensuring statistical significance with our user base. What are the key technical and statistical challenges?

30.Atlassian's largest enterprise customers have Jira instances with over 1 million issues. One customer reports that their advanced JQL searches are timing out after our recent query optimization. How do you investigate and resolve this?