Atlassian

Atlassian Interviews

1. Jun 15, 2022

   Software Engineer Interview

   Anonymous Employee in Sydney

   Accepted Offer

   Negative Experience

   Difficult Interview

   Application

   I applied online. I interviewed at Atlassian (Sydney)

   Interview

   Application took 10 weeks. They emphasised experience with high-scale distributed cloud systems and didn't value experience outside this area nor years of experience.
   
   You aren't applying for a specific role or team. You are entering a pool of candidates in a stream (eg backend software engineer), and Atlassian chooses your level and team.
   
   
   Interview 1: technical screen
   
   Call with internal recruiter from Atlassian. They were friendly but to the point. (External recruiters skip this step and represent you to the company themselves.)
   
   They asked for summary of my experience and asked if I had experience in their narrow areas of interest. They weren't interested in most experience but were over-interested in my most recent team's structure and practices.
   
   They said Atlassian follows TDD, which turned out to be team-dependent.
   
   
   Interview 2: code design
   
   Interview with engineer. Task was "implement rate limiter". They sent method signature to implement. Focus was rate limiting algorithm, not system or integration. I asked for requirements and context but they refused. I pressed, and then they gave a bit of context.
   
   I discussed trade-offs of different algorithms and suggested some options. I chose a medium difficulty algorithm so implementation wouldn't look trivial. They expected me to know rate limiting algorithms and wouldn't let me Google the options for discussion.
   
   I followed TDD, which worked but took time. I collaborated with the interviewer on test cases to focus on. I ran out of time but partly finished. Interview went smoothly and interviewer was friendly and flexible.
   
   Recruiter said interview went very well.
   
   
   Interview 3: data structures
   
   Interview with engineer. Task was to "implement voting system". Interviewer had terrible communication and refused to provide clarity or context on requirements, wasting 10 minutes at the start. Turned out scope of task is to implement a method taking in an array and remapping the data before returning a result. There is no system or integration aspect to it.
   
   I followed TDD, which was helpful as interviewer often asked me to implement specific aspects or tweak requirements. I got half-way and ran out of time.
   
   Interviewer was not friendly and had strange and narrow-minded opinions. Might have been a junior engineer.
   
   Recruiter said interview went well but I didn't finish. I was handed over to another recruiter for remaining interviews.
   
   
   Interview 4: system design
   
   Interview with senior engineer. Task was "design colour picker". I explained this was a back-end interview, not front-end. I asked for clarification and tried to extract context plus functional and non-functional requirements, but they refused. This threw off the whole interview because you can't design a system without this info.
   
   I designed a generic CRUD system with DB structure, REST API, and application. We ran out of time as the interviewer focused on playing mind games, so I didn't get to address all assessment criteria. Interviewer was friendly but set me up to fail.
   
   Recruiter told me interview went ok but system needed to accommodate non-functional requirements, multi-region fail-over, and should have used DynamoDB. (Although recruiter advised me before interview to use whichever DBMS I was comfortable with.)
   
   
   Interview 5: values
   
   Interview with engineer. Straight-forward interview with series of behavioural questions to gauge my alignment to company values.
   
   Unlike the others, this interviewer had conversational and human approach, and they structured the interview smoothly, which helped me relax and provide relevant answers while having time to work through all assessment criteria.
   
   Recruiter told me I did very well. Atlassian then selected a team to place me in.
   
   
   Interview 6: manager
   
   Interview with engineering manager from wider team I was selected for. Series of behavioural questions. Interviewer was unclear about which areas they were assessing, and they were disorganised.
   
   They focused on failure, down-playing my experience, and fault-finding. Interview was stressful, impersonal, frustrating, and didn't give me opportunities to address all assessment criteria.
   
   Recruiter told me they did not get enough "signal" but interview was ok.
   
   
   Verdict:
   
   They didn't ask for references, and I was given a low offer because some interviews did not have enough "signal". I explained interviews were not conducted well and didn't give me the opportunity to address all assessment criteria, but they had "don't care" attitude and lied to address some concerns.
   
   Interview process was impersonal, stressful, exhausting, narrow-minded, and disappointing. Felt like Atlassian lives in its own bubble. Outcome of interview was largely driven by luck, which interviewers I got, and hiring team's biases.
   
   Sadly, employee experience has similar problems to application process but still worth considering.
   

   Interview

   Tell me about the structure of your current team

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