The process contains 5 rounds:

1. Initial Screening with the recruiter
2. Skill Assessment
3. Technical Interview
4. Behavioural Interview
5. Final Interview with the hiring manager

I only got through to round 3 and was rejected in the Technical Interview stage.

Skill Assessment:

Mindset Questions - Questions about your experience in general.

Exploratory Testing - General Exploratory Testing task for a feature in Confluence. Very easy. Remember they are looking to cover all aspects, not just feature or regression testing.

Automation Framework - Easy to implement if you know any programming language and are familiar with Selenium WebDriver.

I cleared the skill assessment with ease.

The technical interview was generally a good experience, but there were a few things that didn't quite match my expectations.

The interview had three phases:

1. General Questions - Focused around current experience and coaching developers. I did reasonably okay as I had prior experience coaching developers, but honestly, I don't look forward to wearing too many hats in a job; I prefer a specialist role.

2. Code Review - It included a code snippet where I was expected to find bugs. I was expected to find three, but I found two before time ran out. This was a good exercise and something I hadn't experienced before. I am happy I did okay here.

3. Technical Questions - Mostly around non-functional testing like performance and security. They were interested in how I could influence developers to consider these aspects from the beginning. I tried my best, but honestly, I knew I wasn't a good fit because I am not a coach.

Generally, I had expected a few questions around the responses I provided in the Skill Assessment, particularly from the mindset exercise, because the skill assessment clearly mentioned there would be questioning around them, which didn't happen.

This is probably very important for anyone who applies at Atlassian: The job title can somewhat confuse you into thinking there is more hands-on work as an engineering role would entail. Quality Engineers for Atlassian means you work as a consultant or a coach, expected to do no hands-on testing or automation.

Although I acknowledge that the recruiter mentioned during my initial screening that this is not a hands-on role, I wanted to know this from the Quality Engineers themselves, hence I kept going through the initial phases of the interview.

If I am being utterly honest, I knew it wasn’t meant to be because I consider myself more hands-on. Hypothetically, it felt like I was part of a football team where I was selected only to spend my time on the bench forever.

Certainly not for me.

I hope my honest response here helps anyone who interviews for QE roles at Atlassian.