Last year mid, i have applied for a Senior Full-stack Engineer position with Atlassian. Initially i got a call from HR but my profile was not moved forward. Later i applied for multiple positions (mostly front-end) via LinkedIn and during the month of November i received the call from HR and they are interested to schedule my technical interviews.To my knowledge, if anyone talks about Atlassian the next thing coming to my mind will be Jira.
The recruiting HR was very friendly and they told me the position which i applied mapped to the confluence team for a full stack role. They asked 3–4 timings for the following week to schedule my first technical interview. The first technical interview was a System Design Interview (more into front-end). This was a surprise to me, as most of tech companies will go for problem solving rounds. The recruiter clearly mentioned for this position they will check my front-end skills, problem solving skills and no DSA based questions.
First Interview — Front end System Design
I didn’t find any specific format/material for front end system design. But i find the material from https://www.frontendinterviewhandbook.com/ are quite helpful. During the interview, the interviewer was polite and he asked about my experience. Then he asked me to design a feature which consists of list of task and for each task will have multiple tags. I took some time and asked all the possible questions to the interviewer and then started design via the online https://witeboard.com/. At first i designed the components (checkbox and tags) for the task feature and then designed the API’s, Data model for the feature. The interviewer asked few questions about the desing and i was able to provide a answers in a optimal way. Overall i felt the interview went normal.
After couple of days, i got positive feedback from the HR and they are moving forward my profile for the onsite interview.
Onsite Interview — Preparation
I had a briefing call with the recruiter about the onsite interview which consists of 5 rounds. The interviewer was sharing what kind of questions i can expect from technical rounds and behavioral rounds.
- Coding Interview
- Full stack Craft Interview
- System Design Interview
- Values Interview
- Management Interview
The HR told the interviews can be spitted as two sections on first day i can take 3 rounds and on second day i can have the rest. I took a breathing space of 3 weeks for the preparation. I didn’t see any proper guides for the interview similar to other tech companies. So i decided to prepare on my own. The interview mainly focus on behavioral, cultural & technical.
Glassdoor
Most helpful resource where we can find the similar questions asked during the interview. I took more than 50+ questions on both technical and behavioral.
Behavioral
I find the below materials are really helpful not only for Atlassian but for other companies too.
I come up with 5–10 stories which happened during my work life and groomed the stories with STAR approach. This was really helpful as it fits into most of the behavioral questions.
Values
For values, the best resource would be atlassian website. For each values i come up with my own story which can match with the values
Technical
Through Glassdoor i took few technical questions and i worked on that. Apart from that built few apps like TicTacToe, TodoList and few more. I noticed building file tree structure via Java Script was asked by the interviewer quite frequently. And for the Craft interview, i prepared on common/basic things like how browser renders web application, how internet works and about Java script. I was quite confident and prepared pretty well.
Unfortunately due to my personal issue, the first 3 interviews got postponed to a different day. And the interview order changed to 5,4,1,3,2
5. Management Interview
This was a one hour interview, the hiring manager introduces about himself and his team. And then i shared about myself, my past, current work experience and about my goal/ambition etc. He is really cool and a good listener. Then he asked around 5–6 behavioral questions which i answered really well. I forgot most of the questions but one question he asked was about conflict of interest.
4. Values Interview
This was again a hour interview, the interviewer was friendly from the beginning. Initial 5–10 mins went on introduction and then he asked question about each values of Atlassian. It was basically a kind of behavioral interview but the questions linked towards their 5 values
The first section really went well, somehow i crossed half of the interview.
1. Coding Interview
For the coding interview, the HR earlier informed me to setup the workspace locally and framework of my preference. My bad, on my local machine angular cli and node.js was not getting installed, i took it as light hearted and i trusted on more into online platforms like codesandbox/stackblitz.
The coding interview happened during afternoon and the interviewer was a young engineer around 2–3 yrs experience. The interviewer was a react developer but i came from angular background. The interviewer sent a file which consist of data in json format. And it was the same file tree structure question which i found on glassdoor. The intention of this question is to develop the tree structure similar to github or bibucket.
I built the app on the online platform and from the start onward the app got hanged and i lost my patience. With great difficulty i was able render the json and display the tree structure on browser without styles on the app. I explained the approach on why i came up with this approach. At one point i forgot to make a recursion feature into reusable component. As i don’t have time i explained how to built the stateless reusable component and place it into the feature.
The interviewer mentioned the approach was fine, but i felt the interview doesn’t went well as i failed to show a proper working application with some sort of styles.
3. System Design Interview
Since my first round was a system design, i was quite confident on this round.The interview was taken by two young engineers and i used witeboard tool for designing.
The interviewer asked me to design a functionality which i felt similar to Trello. This time the system design was a advanced one, the interviewer looking for component design, performance, state management, stability and few more. I have asked all the possible use cases for the design and then started with my approach. With the limited amount time i come withe components, application design, data model, api’s. The interviewer quite interested to learn about the state management of the design. I was able to provide most of the information about state management. The interview even exceeds the time , finally the interviewer stopped and he says the design looks fine.
I felt the interview was not normal as the interviewer was not much impressed and kept on asking for questions. At some point i felt, the interviewer is trying to outsmart me.
1. Full stack Craft Interview
I don’t have any clue what they are going to ask or the pattern of the interview. Again the interview was taken by two young engineers and both are from different teams. They told as if they are new to team and i need to explain about the application
One among them asked me to walk through on the recent application which i worked. I shared how i built the app and what are the stacks i used to build the application. The interviewer asked me to consider authentication on top of my application and from there he asked to demonstrate. I told him i am not aware of authentication/login module, because i never worked on authentication/login module features. But the interviewer wants me to explain on the authentication part. In my current work, i work closely with my back-end engineers, through them i heard of terms like SALT, base 64 for authentication process. With that small about knowledge i shared how i can build the authentication logic on my application. Both the interviewers are silent and noticed conversation was not much appealing.
At the end of the interview, i asked questions about their current work and other things. Overall the craft interview didn’t went well.
Final Decision
After 2–3 days i didn’t get updates about the interview. Then after checking with them they told they are not considering for this position. I asked for the feedback from the interviewers, that will help me for next time. But due to confidentiality purpose they didn’t share the feedback.
Overall, i feel Atlassian is a very good tech company with great values. And they have more young engineers as their workforce.
Lets see next time, my job hunt on tech based companies continues…..
