Atlassian SDE 2 (P4) Interview Experience: Bangalore, 2021

AtlassianSDE 2 (P4)·Bangalore·Interviewed September 2021Offer

Updated July 17, 2026

This write-up covers a Software Development Engineer 2 (P4) interview loop at Atlassian, based on a candidate's account posted publicly to LeetCode Discuss. The candidate interviewed for a Bangalore-based role in September 2021 and reported that the full process, from first contact to offer, took about one and a half months.

The loop opened with an HR conversation that included several technical questions, then moved through three problem-solving rounds covering low-level design, code design, and system design, and closed with a values round and a management round. The candidate noted that Atlassian's rounds leaned toward practical design problems rather than classic algorithm questions, and described receiving an offer roughly a week after the final interview.

How the process went

Overall timeline
The candidate reported that the entire interview process, from initial contact to receiving an offer, took about one and a half months.
HR discussion
A 40-minute HR conversation opened the loop, covering the candidate's current projects and responsibilities alongside a set of technical questions the candidate said were unexpected in an HR setting.
Technical design rounds
Three back-to-back one-hour rounds followed: a low-level design round, a code design round, and a system design round. Coding rounds required working code in an IDE and test cases, per the candidate's notes.
Values and management rounds
The loop closed with a one-hour values round focused on culture fit and a one-hour management round centered on the candidate's past experience.
Outcome
The candidate reported receiving an offer about a week after the final round.

HR Discussion

Background review combined with unscripted technical questions · 40 minutes

Detailed discussion of the candidate's current projects, role, and responsibilities.
What data structures are used in an LRU cache?
How would you design an in-memory cache to store a stream of integer values?
What are the major pros and cons of using a hashing data structure?
What are the key factors that define good code?
What are microservices? How many do you own in your current role, and what impact do they have?

The candidate said they were surprised that the HR round included technical questions.

Round 1: Low-Level Design

Low-level design with working code and test cases in an IDE · 1 hour

Design the low-level design (LLD) for an API rate limiter.

The candidate solved the base problem, then was asked to extend it with added complexity and solved that with some hints from the interviewer.

Round 2: Code Design

Modeling and aggregating data across files and collections · 1 hour

Given a list of files, each with a name, size, and optional collection membership (a file may belong to more than one collection), how would you design a system to calculate the total size of files processed?
How would you extend that system to calculate the top K collections by total size?

Round 3: System Design

Cross-product tagging system at scale · 1 hour

How would you design a system to add tags for related pages across different Atlassian products (for example, Jira issues, Confluence pages, Bitbucket pull requests, and Trello boards)?
How would you scale that system to handle 100 million tag requests a day?

The candidate described approaching the problem by first identifying functional and non-functional requirements, then the data storage model, then a high-level component design and how the components interact.

Round 4: Values

Culture-fit assessment · 1 hour

Multiple behavioral questions were used to assess fit with Atlassian's values; the candidate's post did not detail the specific prompts.

Round 5: Management Round

Discussion of past experience with a manager · 1 hour

An in-depth discussion of the candidate's past work experience and career history; the candidate's post did not list specific questions.

Key takeaways

Be ready to justify past technical decisions in detail, including ownership and impact, since this came up even during the HR conversation rather than only in later rounds.
Practice writing low-level designs as working, runnable code with test cases rather than pseudocode only, since the LLD round expected code in an IDE.
Review approaches for aggregating grouped or nested data, such as computing totals and top-K results across overlapping collections, since this came up as a code design problem.
For system design questions, structure the answer around functional and non-functional requirements first, then data storage, then a high-level component view, before addressing scale.
Expect the loop to include non-coding rounds on values and management background in addition to the technical rounds, and prepare a clear narrative of past work for those conversations.

Practice a Atlassian interview

Rehearse out loud against the kinds of questions in this story — with an AI interviewer that asks follow-ups.

Practice this interview

Source

The questions and process facts come from the candidate's public write-up, linked below. The retelling above is our own summary.

Candidate's public write-up on LeetCode Discuss