Design a system for adding tasks to a project and tagging them with labels.
A direct proxy for Jira's core data model — tests whether you can design many-to-many tagging relationships that stay fast as a workspace scales to millions of issues.
AtlassianAtlassian Software Engineer Interview Questions
Atlassian builds the tools — Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket, Trello — that other engineering teams run their work through, which means its own engineering bar is set by the same standards it sells to customers: reliability at scale, clean APIs, and software that holds up under thousands of admins customizing it in ways you didn't anticipate. Interviews lean heavily on system design because a large share of the job is extending existing platforms without breaking them. Screens are frequently administered through Karat, a third-party technical interviewing service, so expect a standardized rubric rather than an improvised conversation.
What the interview process looks like
A typical loop runs recruiter screen, a Karat-administered technical screen (coding plus light system design), an onsite or virtual round covering deeper system design and a pairing/coding exercise, and a values interview mapped to Atlassian's stated principles ("Open company, no bullshit," "Build with heart and balance," "Don't #@!% the customer," "Play, as a team," "Be the change you seek").
Example questions
How would you design a real-time collaborative document editor (like Confluence)?
Probes your grasp of operational transforms or CRDTs, conflict resolution, and how you'd handle concurrent edits without stepping on Atlassian's actual product surface.
Walk me through how you'd design a permissions system for a workspace with nested projects and teams.
Atlassian products live or die on granular access control; this checks whether you think in terms of inheritance, overrides, and audit trails, not just a flat roles table.
Tell me about a time you had to extend a legacy system without breaking existing customers.
Most Atlassian engineering work is additive to products with a decade of accumulated customer customization — this behavioral question filters for people who respect backward compatibility.
How would you design a search feature that indexes millions of tickets across many workspaces?
Tests indexing strategy, multi-tenancy isolation, and query performance trade-offs relevant to Jira/Confluence search at scale.
Describe a situation where you disagreed with a product decision. What did you do?
Maps directly to the "Open company, no bullshit" value — they want to see you raise disagreement constructively, not silently comply or blow up the room.
How would you design a webhook/event system so third-party apps can react to changes in a project?
Atlassian's ecosystem (Marketplace apps, Forge) depends on reliable eventing — this checks whether you understand delivery guarantees, retries, and ordering.
Write a function that groups a list of tasks by label and returns counts per label.
A practical coding warm-up that mirrors the tagging system-design question, checking clean code habits before the harder architecture rounds.
Tell me about a time you shipped something and it broke a customer's workflow. What happened next?
Reveals whether you own mistakes, communicate transparently, and follow through on fixes — core to "Don't #@!% the customer."