Atlassian Software Engineer Interview Questions

Atlassian·Software Engineer·Onsite - Multi Round

Jul 2026

Got an SDE intern offer from Atlassian for summer 2027 after three rounds: a tough OA, an AI-assisted coding session inside a live repo, and a values-based behavioral round with a senior engineer. The OA was the hardest part by far; the rest was more manageable than expected.

You're given access to an unfamiliar codebase in an IDE with an AI coding agent. Debug existing issues and implement new features using the agent.
Describe a situation where you demonstrated one of our company values.

“This was way less scary than it sounds.”

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Atlassian·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jul 2026

System design round at Atlassian focused entirely on building a tagging system with a heavy emphasis on REST API design. The problem felt deceptively scoped but the edge cases and concurrency bits made it genuinely tricky.

Design a tagging system (like tagging pages or issues) with a focus on REST API design. Cover CRUD for tags, attaching and detaching tags from entities, listing tags per entity, and searching entities by tag with AND/OR semantics.
How would you handle concurrency and idempotency for tag attach and detach operations?
Walk through the edge cases: what happens when you delete a tag that's still attached to entities, how do you handle rename collisions within a workspace, and how do you approach bulk attach/detach?
How would you design pagination for the tag list and entity search endpoints?

“This is the kind of question where you think you've got it in the first five minutes and then you don't.”

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Atlassian·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026

Atlassian SWE interview with a design-heavy coding problem that looked straightforward but had a lot of follow-up potential baked in. The discussion went longer than I expected once we got into trade-offs.

Design and implement a small system where records of (agent_id, rating) arrive over time. The system should compute each agent's average rating and return all agents sorted by average rating descending, with agent_id ascending as a tie-breaker.

“My first instinct was to store raw records and recompute averages on every query, which the interviewer let me talk through before nudging me to think about scale.”

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Atlassian·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jul 2026

System design round at Atlassian for a software engineer role, focused entirely on building a trending/top-N posts feature for Confluence. Pretty deep dive, they wanted the full pipeline from event ingestion all the way through to serving.

Design a system that surfaces the top-N posts on Confluence based on engagement signals like views, likes, and comments within configurable time windows.

“This is a meaty one.”

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Atlassian·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026

Atlassian software engineer interview with a system design coding problem focused on building an agent-rating service. The core challenge was less about getting something working and more about justifying your data structure choices under follow-up pressure.

Design and implement an agent-rating service with two operations: one to record a score (1-5) for a named agent and keep a running average, and another to return all agents ranked by average score descending. How do you keep this efficient?

“I jumped straight to the brute force because I wanted something on the board fast.”

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Atlassian·Software Engineer·Technical Phone Screen

Jul 2026

Atlassian software engineer interview with a grid-based word search problem. Pretty standard algorithmic round but the complexity discussion was where things got interesting.

Given an m x n character grid and a target word, can the word be found by moving through horizontally or vertically adjacent cells without reusing any cell? Walk through your approach and analyze the time and space complexity.

“DFS with backtracking was the obvious move here and I got there pretty quickly.”

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Atlassian·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jun 2026

System design round at Atlassian for a software engineer role, focused entirely on a notification reliability problem. Pretty deep dive, the kind where you realize halfway through that you've been thinking about it too shallowly.

Your document-signing system is supposed to send notifications after a signature event, but some notifications are silently dropped and nothing shows up in the logs. How do you redesign this to be reliable?
How would you guarantee a notification is persisted before it's ever attempted, so a crash between signing and sending doesn't silently lose it?
How do you make sure retries don't result in duplicate notifications being sent to the user?
What observability would you build around this notification pipeline, and how would you know something is going wrong before users start complaining?
How would you handle documents that were signed but never notified, where the failure happened before anything was even queued?

“This is a bigger question than it looks.”

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Atlassian·Software Engineer·Onsite - Behavioral / Leadership

Jun 2026

Behavioral round at Atlassian for a software engineer role, pretty much one big question about mentorship and knowing when to step in versus back off. Not a lot of technical stuff, just them digging into how you work with people.

Tell me about a time you helped a teammate through a challenge. Walk through what happened, why you got involved, what you actually did, any friction you ran into, and what came out of it. Also: how do you decide when to help versus when to let someone figure it out on their own?

“The last part of this question is what got me.”

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Atlassian·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jun 2026

Atlassian system design round focused entirely on building an authorization system from scratch, combining RBAC and ACL patterns. Pretty deep dive, they wanted the full picture: schema, evaluation logic, APIs, caching, audit logs. Left feeling like I covered maybe 70% of what they were actually looking for.

Design an authorization system that supports both role-based access control (RBAC) and resource-level ACLs, working across multiple resource types like spaces, pages, projects, and issues.
Walk through your permission evaluation algorithm. How do you resolve conflicts between role-based permissions and resource-level ACLs?
What REST APIs would you expose for granting and revoking access, and for checking whether a user is authorized to perform an action?
How would you handle caching for permission checks, and what are the consistency trade-offs when group membership or roles change?
What edge cases would you need to handle, such as deny overrides, permission inheritance across resource hierarchies, and real-time group membership changes?
How would you design the audit logging component for this authorization system?

“I started with the data model because that felt safest, laid out a users/groups/roles table and a separate permissions table linking subjects to resources.”

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Atlassian·Software Engineer·Onsite - System Design / Architecture

Jun 2026

System design round at Atlassian focused on concurrency in a hierarchical org structure. Pretty deep question with a lot of moving parts, felt like they wanted to see how far you could push the design before it fell apart.

Given an organization hierarchy with users and groups, design thread-safe add and remove operations. Walk through your API design, your concurrency strategy, and how you'd avoid deadlocks.
How do you guarantee that reads are consistent while writes are happening concurrently, especially for long-running read queries?
How would you test for concurrency correctness in this system? What does your testing strategy look like?

“This one sprawled way more than I expected.”

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