The application process took 10 weeks. Atlassian emphasized experience with high-scale distributed cloud systems and did not value experience outside this area, nor did they consider years of experience.

It's important to note that you aren't applying for a specific role or team when entering the candidate pool. Instead, you enter a stream (e.g., backend software engineer), and Atlassian chooses your level and team.

Interview 1: Technical Screen

A call with an 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 a summary of your experience and if you had experience in their narrow areas of interest. They weren't interested in most of your experience but were over-interested in your most recent team's structure and practices.

They mentioned that Atlassian follows TDD, which turned out to be team-dependent.

Interview 2: Code Design

An interview with an engineer. The task was to "implement a rate limiter." They sent the method signature to implement. The focus was on the rate-limiting algorithm, not the system or integration. You asked for requirements and context, but they refused. After pressing, they provided a bit of context.

You discussed the trade-offs of different algorithms and suggested some options. You chose a medium-difficulty algorithm so the implementation wouldn't look trivial. They expected you to know rate-limiting algorithms and did not allow you to Google options for discussion.

You followed TDD, which worked but took time. You collaborated with the interviewer on test cases to focus on. You ran out of time but were partly finished. The interview went smoothly, and the interviewer was friendly and flexible.

The recruiter said the interview went very well.

Interview 3: Data Structures

An interview with an engineer. The task was to "implement a voting system." The interviewer had terrible communication and refused to provide clarity or context on requirements, wasting 10 minutes at the start. It turned out the scope of the task was to implement a method that takes an array, remaps the data, and then returns a result. There was no system or integration aspect to it.

You followed TDD, which was helpful as the interviewer often asked you to implement specific aspects or tweak requirements. You got halfway and ran out of time.

The interviewer was not friendly and held strange and narrow-minded opinions. They might have been a junior engineer.

The recruiter said the interview went well, but you didn't finish. You were then handed over to another recruiter for the remaining interviews.

Interview 4: System Design

An interview with a senior engineer. The task was to "design a color picker." You explained this was a back-end interview, not front-end. You asked for clarification and tried to extract context plus functional and non-functional requirements, but they refused. This threw off the entire interview, as you cannot design a system without this information.

You designed a generic CRUD system with a database structure, REST API, and application. You ran out of time as the interviewer focused on playing mind games, so you didn't get to address all assessment criteria. The interviewer was friendly but seemed to set you up to fail.

The recruiter told you the interview went okay but mentioned the system needed to accommodate non-functional requirements, multi-region fail-over, and should have used DynamoDB. (Although the recruiter had advised you before the interview to use whichever DBMS you were comfortable with.)

Interview 5: Values

An interview with an engineer. This was a straightforward interview with a series of behavioral questions to gauge your alignment with company values.

Unlike the others, this interviewer had a conversational and human approach. They structured the interview smoothly, which helped you relax and provide relevant answers while having time to work through all assessment criteria.

The recruiter told you that you did very well. Atlassian then selected a team to place you in.

Interview 6: Manager

An interview with an engineering manager from the wider team you were selected for. This involved a series of behavioral questions. The interviewer was unclear about which areas they were assessing and seemed disorganized.

They focused on failures, down-played your experience, and engaged in fault-finding. The interview was stressful, impersonal, frustrating, and didn't give you opportunities to address all assessment criteria.

The recruiter told you they did not get enough "signal" but that the interview was okay.

Verdict:

They did not ask for references, and you were given a low offer because some interviews did not have enough "signal." You explained that the interviews were not conducted well and didn't provide opportunities to address all assessment criteria, but they had a "don't care" attitude and lied to address some concerns.

The interview process was impersonal, stressful, exhausting, narrow-minded, and disappointing. It felt like Atlassian lives in its own bubble. The outcome of the interview was largely driven by luck, depending on which interviewers you got and the hiring team's biases.

Sadly, employee experience has similar problems to the application process, but it's still worth considering.

Tell me about the structure of your current team.

How does your current team do testing?

Summarise your experience.

What is the largest scale system you have worked on?

I want you to implement a rate limiter.

I want you to implement a voting system.

Design a colour picker system.

Tell me about a time you had a conflict with someone.

Tell me about a time when someone needed help but didn't ask for it.

Tell me about a time you worked on a project that failed.

Tell me how you broke down and planned out the tasks for a recent project.