Applied for a Senior Front-end role on the Confluence team.

~6 weeks later, a recruiter reached out, saying the role was filled but offering an opportunity to interview for a new position.

Re-applied for a Front-end position on the Trello team.

Phone screen: Technical interview about designing a list component. There was not much code to write, but refactoring/redesigning portions of the component was expected.

A second recruiter reached out to provide interview prep for the final round. They stated that there would be no back-end style system-design questions, as this was a front-end interview.

A third recruiter scheduled the final round interview, split over two separate days.

First interview: A back-end system design question (design a web scraper for images).

Second interview: A "values" interview. Candidates were expected to discuss how their experience reflects Atlassian's list of values. Two interviewers, both relatively new to the company and neither software engineers.

Third interview: "Full stack craft." The interviewer was a recent graduate with 1 year of full-time experience. It was a peculiar experience to have a new graduate evaluating senior-level candidates. This interviewer was obsessed with login and authentication workflows, which was unfortunate as my last position focused on application content. This interviewer also directly stated that the codebase was a mess with significant technical debt, in contrast to the previous two interviewers.

Between the two interview days, the third recruiter called to explain a mistake in scheduling the interview for a back-end track and that the final coding screen would need to be rescheduled to a third interview day (which likely explained the web scraper question).

Fourth interview: Hiring/direct manager. While describing their team's function, after a few minutes, I had to ask what team they were on, as their description did not align with Trello. It turned out they worked on an admin tool for managing permissions across Atlassian products for large companies. This implied I had been re-applied to a third position without notification. The interview did not proceed well after this revelation.

I withdrew from the interview process at this point and did not proceed to the fifth technical interview.

Overall, the process was long and complicated, with too many different recruiters and interviews. Interviewers seemed to rely on the company's "good reputation" without providing concrete examples of the culture or environment. Most interviewers were relatively new (3 out of 5 with less than 18 months tenure), and each provided a different perspective on the engineering culture, technical debt, and future direction.

In summary, the company appears poorly organized and somewhat chaotic.

Design a web scraper.

What is your favorite Atlassian value?

What is a time you shipped a broken feature?

What were your favorite and least favorite teams to be on?