R&D Interviewing at Atlassian: What You Need to Know
Are you looking to get into hyper growth in a company that’s climbing exponentially? Atlassian has become a sought after company in the past few years and has an incredibly hard interview process that varies depending on discipline. Today we’ll cover the interview processes for engineering, design and product management.
Engineering
Recruiter Conversation: (30 mins) Getting to know you - this interview will cover:
- The role scope and expectations for career trajectory
- Compensation and motivations
- Value fit, team fit and skill set fit
Vibe: Conversational but evaluative. Be prepared to answer questions around why you want to work at Atlassian, who you are both in and out of work, and go into detailed descriptions about your experience (This will be true for almost any discipline or skill set). If you are interviewing for a technical role, it will cover your technical projects and scale, along with your approach and thinking.
First Round: (60 mins) The technical interview - this interview will cover:
- Basic CS skills, technical depth & ability to improvise when things go wrong
- Communication skills, are you able to walk the interviewer through your code and choices you make and why?
- Scalability and quality code - are you thinking about the scalability of your solution and is it quality code that other engineers can work within?
Final Round: The in-depth interviews - this interview is broken into these parts;
- Architecture & System Design (60 mins): This is all around solution thinking and scalability. It will cover how you design a system to be extensible and scalable across products. Make sure to ask clarifying questions, a lot of folks will jump into problems too quickly and lack scale or important use cases.
- Values Interview (45 mins): This will be the same regardless of what skillset you are interviewing for. It will be about your motivations, goals, likes and ability to collaborate with others. This is more of a conversational interview about who you are and how your value aligns with the Atlassian values.
- Hiring Manager Interview (30-45 mins): This will cover your overall engineering ability, your personality and team fit and how you would round out the responsibilities of the role itself. Be prepared to answer questions about your background, how you function in team settings and your overall demeanor and thinking
- Coding Exercise (60 mins): One or more rounds testing your coding ability. Be prepared to be tested on code quality and algorithmic thinking. In frontend it will be focused on browser coding and building UIs (Atlassian is primarily living in JavaScript for frontend) and for backend it will focus on infrastructure and scalability (Atlassian mostly lives in Java for the backend). Ask questions, communicate through your thinking and solutions and don’t be afraid to use your interviewer as a resource.
Product Management
First Round: (45-60 mins) The Hiring Manager Interview - this will cover:
- In-depth dives into your overall experience
- How you drive a product forward effectively and influence other teams
- Prioritization basics - how do you align team and company goals and inspire your team to do the same?
Final Round: The in-depth interviews - they are broken down into four parts:
- Leadership (60 mins): For people managers, this will cover driving career growth, working with stakeholders/C-Suite and your ability to influence and drive your team. For individual contributors this will cover your ability to influence your team around your decision making, your approach in driving a project or product and your ability to get others to work with you.
- Product Mastery (60 mins): This is the core of a good product manager. This will cover prioritization, tech debt, organizational goals and overall approach. You will be expected to go deeper here, will be faced with hypothetical questions that require quick decision making and strong product management skills.
- Driving Results (60 mins): Metrics, metrics, metrics. How do we know this product is successful? How do you know that this is the right metric to determine success? Be prepared to go deep into measurable results, data influences everything the Atlassian product team does and is critical in this question. If you’re just looking at MAU it won’t cover it. Be prepared to speak to success metrics, how to change course if the data isn’t meaningful and how you drive forward a successful product.
- Values Interview (45 mins): This will be the same regardless of what skillset you are interviewing for. It will be about your motivations, goals, likes and ability to collaborate with others. This is more of a conversational interview about who you are and how your value aligns with the Atlassian values.
Product Design
First Round: (45-60 mins) Hiring Manager Conversation:
- Covers your recent and applicable design projects, the scalability and functionality
- For people managers will cover your ability to drive an effective design team, design critiques and overall quality and decision making
- Will touch on your design principles, how you work with engineering and product and how to push design forward
Final Round: This round is broken into three pieces:
- Portfolio Review (60 mins): This will be conducted with two other designers who will review your portfolio. It is recommended to bring 2-3 samples that you can speak to in-depth. They will want to understand your thinking, constraints, design principles and ability to drive forward with engineering and product.
- Design Exercise (90 mins): This is a design exercise that you will do on the spot with two other designers. They are looking for effective collaboration, good communication and a well designed, scalable solution. You are encouraged to ask clarifying questions and the designers are there to help you, don’t be afraid to use them as a resource.
- Values Interview (45 mins): This will be the same regardless of what skillset you are interviewing for. It will be about your motivations, goals, likes and ability to collaborate with others. This is more of a conversational interview about who you are and how your value aligns with the Atlassian values.
Note: Regardless of discipline you will always have a recruiter interview and a values interview. Both are more focused on who you are as a human, what motivates you and your passions and how your values align with the Atlassian values. Make sure to check out Atlassian’s values and familiarize yourself with them.
Tips & Tricks
- Ask clarifying questions in all technical, design and hypothetical scenarios. Asking clarifying questions shows that you want to deeply understand the problem rather than immediately jumping in.
- Prepare 1-2 case studies or past projects that you’re proud of, and at least one example of a project where you made mistakes and how you learned from them. If you already have these in your head, it’s easy to pull examples or your direct experience to questions asked by interviewers.
- If you’re stumped on a question or nervous, use verbiage like “that’s a good question, I want to take a second to think of a thoughtful answer” - it gives you time to breathe and shows you’re detailed and thoughtful.
- Be honest about your mistakes. Atlassian looks for talent and skill, but it also looks for humility and learning. Making mistakes is just part of the process, be honest about how you learned from them and how it made you better in the long run.
About The Author
Kylie is a writer and educator with experience in hyper growth recruiting who specializes in writing and speaking about tech, ethical hiring practices, diversity, equity and inclusion. She has worked for Atlassian and Airbnb and has led product, design and leadership hiring.