Atlassian Staff Software Engineer Interview Questions

1.Tell me about a time you built and shipped a prototype or experiment in under a week to test a hypothesis. What did you learn and how did it influence the final product?

2.Describe a project where you had to maintain momentum and alignment across a globally distributed engineering team for several months. What were your biggest challenges and how did you solve them?

3.Walk me through a complex technical project you led with team members across different time zones. How did you handle the coordination challenges and what communication practices did you establish?

4.Describe a team practice or process you introduced that measurably improved how your team worked together. What was broken, what did you implement, and how did you measure the improvement?

5.Tell me about a time you were a heavy user of a product you were building and discovered a significant issue through your own usage. How did you escalate it and what was the outcome?

6.Walk me through a time you convinced your team to try a completely new technical approach with limited time to validate it. What was the risk, how did you prototype it, and what happened?

7.Write a function that takes a list of Jira issue transitions and returns the longest path from any 'To Do' status to any 'Done' status. Each transition has from_status, to_status, and duration_days.

8.You're investigating a memory leak in a Java service that processes Confluence page updates. Memory usage grows steadily over days and GC isn't helping. Walk me through your debugging approach.

9.You need to implement a GraphQL resolver that fetches Jira issues across multiple projects, but some projects are in different AWS regions due to data residency requirements. How do you handle this efficiently?

10.You're tasked with adding a new feature flag system to control rollout of Atlassian Intelligence features. The flags need to work across Jira, Confluence, and Trello with different rollout percentages per product. What's your implementation approach?

11.You're designing a new microservice that needs to handle real-time collaborative editing for Confluence pages. Multiple users can edit simultaneously, and you need to ensure consistency without blocking writes. How would you architect this?

12.Design a system to detect and prevent abuse in Trello's public board sharing feature. You need to handle millions of board views per day and block obvious spam or malicious content quickly.

13.Tell me about a time you had to influence engineering leaders in other teams to adopt a technical standard or practice you believed was important. How did you approach them and what was the outcome?

14.Tell me about a time when you had to help an underperforming team member while also keeping your team's delivery commitments on track. How did you balance both responsibilities?

15.Describe a situation where you discovered your team was building something that wouldn't actually solve the customer problem. How did you handle it and what did you change?

16.Tell me about a project where you had to balance shipping something fast versus getting the technical quality where you wanted it. How did you make that decision and involve your team?

17.Walk me through a time when you had to deliver difficult feedback to a peer engineer who was more senior than you. What was the situation and how did you approach it?

18.Describe a time when you saw an opportunity to improve something significant across multiple engineering teams but had no mandate to do it. What did you do?

19.Jira has 100 million monthly active users. If we wanted to add a real-time notification feature that pings users when issues they're watching get updated, estimate the infrastructure cost and design the notification delivery system.

20.Estimate the impact on Atlassian's revenue if Confluence page load times increased by 500ms across all instances. Consider both immediate and long-term effects and walk through your reasoning.

21.Confluence search response times increased by 200ms average over the past month, but our Elasticsearch cluster metrics look normal. No code deployments or infrastructure changes happened. Walk me through how you'd diagnose this.

22.Estimate how many engineering hours Atlassian saves per year by having Jira, Confluence, and Bitbucket integrated compared to if teams used separate, non-integrated tools. Walk through your assumptions.

23.Atlassian Intelligence is rolling out to Jira users, but adoption is only 15% after two months. Usage data shows people try it once but don't come back. How would you structure an investigation to understand why and what would you test first?

24.You notice that Trello board load times are 40% slower in the EU compared to US users, even though we have AWS infrastructure in both regions. The difference is consistent across different board sizes and user types. What's your systematic approach to investigate this?