Atlassian interview experiences from US loops and Bengaluru grads

Atlassian’s interview process for US graduates and interns, in 2025-26 candidate reports, is a 90-minute HackerRank test of two or three LeetCode medium to hard problems, a 45-minute technical round on one medium problem, and a 45-minute behavioral round with an engineering manager. Experienced hires start with a one-hour Karat screen (about 20 minutes of design, 40 of coding), then coding, code design, system design, values and hiring manager rounds.

Atlassian’s Software Engineer, 2027 Graduate U.S. posting lists Zone A base pay of $122,400-$159,800 for new hires in Seattle. India hiring runs through a Graduate Program in Bengaluru; those reports are grouped near the end of the page.

Atlassian interview process, round by round

Atlassian interview process in San Francisco and New York (2025-26)

These are short candidate reports from Taro, not full write-ups. Atlassian hires few US early-career engineers, so the sample is small.

• Software Engineer intern, San Francisco, offer. Applied on September 9 and got a 90-minute HackerRank test three days later with two or three problems. A 45-minute technical round followed in October and a 45-minute behavioral round with an engineering manager in November. The offer came by phone about two months after applying.
• Software Engineer, San Francisco, 2026, offer declined. A recruiter reached out after an online application. The loop was a HackerRank test of 2-3 LeetCode medium to hard problems, one LeetCode medium coding round and a STAR behavioral round, about two weeks end to end.
• Software Engineer, New York, March 2025, Karat screen. One hour with a Karat interviewer: 20 minutes of system design on a TinyURL-style question traced from pressing Enter in the browser, then 40 minutes for two practical, LeetCode medium-level coding problems. The candidate finished about one and a half and was waiting on next steps when they posted.
• Software Engineer, San Francisco, May 2026, no interviews. A recruiter reached out first, then stopped replying while setting up a call. Follow up in writing if scheduling stalls.
• Full stack software engineer, US, March 2025, no offer. A Karat screen on working with stylesheets and the system design of a past project, then three technical interviews: browser coding (build a dropdown populated with data, then style it to match a wireframe), a full stack craft round on what happens after a user logs in, and a system design of a Jira board with tasks, statuses and priorities. Two behavioral interviews followed, one on values and one with management. The rejection came by email 12 days after the final interview, and the candidate says Atlassian’s policy is to give no feedback.
• Software engineer, US, April 2025, no offer. A recruiter call, then a Karat technical interview. The candidate opted into Karat’s redo, and the recruiter said the redo went really well, but the first attempt still kept them from moving forward. A system design question on a social media company’s system also came up.

What the US reports share: the coding bar is LeetCode medium, the first Karat attempt counts, and Atlassian’s design prompts look like its own products.

Atlassian interview questions that come up often

Coding / technical

1. Longest substring without repeating characters - sliding window + hashmap
2. Binary tree level order traversal - BFS
3. Detect cycle in a directed graph - DFS coloring / topological sort
4. Design an LRU cache
5. Merge intervals / overlapping intervals
6. Practical Karat problems: two LeetCode medium-level tasks in 40 minutes
7. Front-end roles: build and style a data-driven dropdown in the browser

System design

1. Design a Jira board with tasks, statuses and priorities
2. Design a job scheduler or background-task queue
3. Design a notification system for a collaboration tool
4. Design a simple URL shortener or rate limiter

Values / behavioral

1. Describe a time you chose the customer’s interest over what was easiest for the business (Don’t #@!% the customer)
2. Tell me about a problem nobody asked you to solve, that you solved anyway (Be the change you seek)
3. Describe a time you gave or received direct, unfiltered feedback (Open company, no bullshit)
4. Tell me about balancing a hard deadline with your team’s wellbeing (Build with heart and balance)
5. Describe a time you put team success ahead of your own individual win (Play, as a team)

Atlassian interview tips from candidate reports

• Treat the first Karat attempt as the one that counts; an April 2025 US candidate’s strong redo did not override a weak first try.
• Narrate your reasoning out loud in coding rounds; Atlassian’s interviewers reportedly weigh communication and code structure about as heavily as correctness.
• Keep system design answers practical and scoped (a feature inside Jira/Confluence, not “design Twitter”) with a real data model and named trade-offs.
• Prepare five separate, professional values stories - one per value - so you’re never reusing material inside the values round.
• Do not expect feedback after a rejection; the March 2025 full stack candidate was told Atlassian’s policy is not to give any.

Behavioral interview

Atlassian’s closest equivalent to an “HR round” is the values interview plus the closing management conversation. Graduates and interns get one 45-minute behavioral round with an engineering manager using STAR questions; experienced hires get separate values and management interviews. Bring five different stories, one per value; the Atlassian behavioral interview questions page has a STAR answer for each.

Sample answers for high-frequency questions

Q. How do you find the longest substring without repeating characters?
A. Use a sliding window with a hash map from character to its last seen index. Move the right pointer across the string; when the current character was seen at an index at or after the current left pointer, jump left to one past that index. Update the best length as right minus left plus one at every step, and always store the current character’s index. This is O(n) time with a single pass and O(min(n, alphabet)) space - Atlassian interviewers usually follow up by asking you to return the substring itself, which just means also recording the window start when the best length improves.

Q. How do you detect a cycle in a directed graph?
A. Run DFS with three-color marking: white for unvisited, grey for nodes on the current recursion stack, black for fully explored. If DFS reaches a grey node, you have found a back edge and therefore a cycle. The alternative is Kahn’s algorithm for topological sort: repeatedly remove nodes with in-degree zero, and if fewer than all nodes come out, the remainder forms a cycle. Both are O(V + E); the DFS version gives you the offending cycle directly, while Kahn’s also gives you a valid ordering when the graph is acyclic.

Q. How would you implement an LRU cache with O(1) get and put?
A. Combine a hash map with a doubly linked list. The map goes from key to the list node holding that key and value; the list keeps nodes in recency order with the most recently used at the head. On get, look up the node in O(1) and move it to the head. On put, update and move to head if the key exists, otherwise insert a new node at the head and, if the size exceeds capacity, remove the tail node and delete its key from the map. A doubly linked list is required because eviction and reordering need O(1) unlinking, which a singly linked list cannot give you.

Q. How do you merge overlapping intervals?
A. Sort the intervals by start time, then sweep through them keeping one current interval. If the next interval’s start is less than or equal to the current interval’s end, they overlap, so extend the current end to the maximum of the two ends; otherwise push the current interval to the output and make the next one current. Remember to push the final interval after the loop. Sorting dominates the cost, so this is O(n log n) time and O(n) output space, and the sort is the key insight the interviewer is checking for.

Q. How would you design a job scheduler or background task queue?
A. Store jobs in a durable table with fields for payload, run-at timestamp, status and attempt count, and have worker processes poll for due jobs using a transactional claim (select the row for update, mark it running) so two workers never take the same job. Use a min-heap or an index on run-at to find the next due job efficiently, and make handlers idempotent because at-least-once delivery means retries will occasionally duplicate work. Add exponential backoff with jitter for failures, a maximum attempt count feeding a dead-letter queue, and a visibility timeout so a job whose worker crashed becomes claimable again.

Atlassian interview tips by round

Atlassian India: Graduate Program interviews in Bengaluru

India graduate loops use the same 90-minute HackerRank test, then one or two technical rounds with a project deep dive and a values and management round with a director or engineering manager. Reported total pay for an India-based entry-level Software Engineer (P30) clusters in the roughly ₹33-50 LPA range in self-reported Levels.fyi data, with a reported median near ₹40-41 LPA; it shifts with role, location and hiring cycle. For OA drills, see Atlassian on placementpapers.app.

Interview experiences from India

Experience 1: Full-time Software Engineer, Bangalore on-campus (virtual)

Source: GeeksforGeeks, Atlassian full-time SWE Bangalore on-campus

Profile: Campus candidate for full-time SWE (Bangalore); four virtual rounds

Round 1 - Online coding

• Three problems: an easy-medium quicksort-related problem (50 points), a hard problem (75 points), and one similar to Weighted Job Scheduling (100 points). The candidate fully solved the first and third and partly solved the second.

Round 2 - Resume screening + DSA (45-50 min)

• Deep project walkthrough: implementation details and real-world use cases.
• Two easy-medium DSA problems; one resembled Minimum Platforms (interval overlap).
• OS as favorite subject: CPU scheduling, Round Robin and SJF, and which algorithm real systems use.

Round 3 - System design + projects (50-55 min)

• Project context: text classification → a low-level suggestion/autocomplete system in any language for a large dictionary.
• Brute-force prefix scan, then a Trie, then caching earlier results in a hashmap when query volume grows.

Round 4 - Values & management (Director + Engineering Manager, 60-65 min)

• No technical questions; resume discussion and Atlassian values prompts.
• The write-up does not state the final result.

Takeaways

• What decided it: A crisp project-to-design story (Trie) after the resume deep-dive, and an hour-long values round treated as scored.

Experience 2: Summer intern, campus drive (three rounds)

Source: WireUnwired, Atlassian interview experience

Profile: SDE summer intern hired through an on-campus drive; the author now works at Atlassian Bangalore

Online assessment (HackerRank, 90 min)

• Three DSA problems; binary search, greedy/math and graphs or DP were common topics. The author says candidates often needed all three correct to advance.

Technical (~60 min, one interviewer)

• Screen share in IDE of choice, with Google allowed for syntax.
• An open-ended problem: brute force first, then an optimized approach, coded, with time/space analysis; then a short talk about the work at Atlassian.

Management & values (~45 min)

• One Engineering Manager; situational questions on projects, tech stack and teamwork, such as a conflict with a teammate or a missed deadline.
• Outcome: selected; the college released the list that evening.

Takeaways

• What decided it: Brute force then optimal with clear complexity in the technical round, and concrete teamwork stories for the Engineering Manager
• Common fail: Treating Atlassian values as automatic after coding

Sources

US reports: Taro: San Francisco intern offer, Taro: San Francisco software engineer, 2026, Taro: New York Karat screen, March 2025, Taro: San Francisco recruiter outreach, May 2026, Taro: US full stack, March 2025, Taro: US Karat redo, April 2025, and Atlassian’s Software Engineer, 2027 Graduate U.S. posting.

India reports: GeeksforGeeks - Atlassian SWE Bangalore on-campus; WireUnwired - Atlassian intern campus drive; Atlassian early careers interview guide.

Similar companies

Google · Microsoft · Amazon · Zoho · Freshworks · Salesforce