Atlassian Interview Experience for SDE 3, P50 Backend Role

7 interview rounds, including 2 Karat interviews.

HR screening round: The HR asked me some basic questions like trees, binary search, some database questions, and about my work and experience.

Karat- The format was to spend 20 minutes on 5 system design questions and 30 minutes on coding, where two questions had to be solved with running code.

LeetCode medium and another hard-level question. I could redo this round within 48 hours, and the best of the two rounds would be considered for evaluation. I wasn't feeling positive and decided to redo. I felt this is a difficult one due to its strict time bound policy. I cleared this round, and HR scheduled the next round. Every round was an elimination round.1/ Code design - I was given a real-world design statement and had to code it with an executable solution. Function signatures were given. It involved some system-level APIs as well.

The interviewer asked about its internals and discussed if I had to implement what change I would implement to make it more usable, efficient, etc. The code was tested against some test cases.2/ Data structures - It involved solving a problem with a combination of data structures, and you had to write code so that you could extend it to implement the follow-up question. I made a small mistake, used the wrong map, and some test cases were failing. But after some debugging, I figured it out.3/ System design - I was asked to design a question similar to social media. We had a discussion on various DB tables, which database to use and why, what are some features of that database, API endpoints, minimum possible API endpoints and DB tables, pagination, indexing, and user experience.

The follow-up was about changes I would make to the system and why if I got a second chance.4/ Values - I was asked a "tell me about a time" type of question, but the focus was on Atlassian values.5/ Managerial - I was asked several questions about my past experiences dealing with situations of conflict, teamwork, team leading, cross-organization impact, etc

.My advice - Don’t take the managerial and values rounds lightly. Based on the performance in these rounds, Atlassian can downlevel or even reject you. For senior roles P50, P60, these two rounds are most important, and the questions they ask are not that easy to answer compared to SDE2 or lower levels. Expectations are high for these roles.Atlassian's compensation is on par with Microsoft, Amazon, and Google.