Atlassian Data Engineer Interview Guide

tl;dr

Atlassian is a company for collaborative innovators that was founded by two Australian college friends in 2001 to fill gaps that they encountered in their own engineering work. Atlassian Data Engineers can expect to contribute to a suite of software solutions that address the real-world problems that affect globally distributed teams, including:

• BitBucket (Code, CI/CD)
• Jira (issue tracking)
• Confluence (collaboration)
• Trello (project management)
• Loom (asynchronous video)

Over 300,000 businesses worldwide rely on Atlassian’s technology, including 80% of Fortune 500 companies, and even NASA. Atlassian is a global company with a famously supportive remote work culture that’s looking to shape the future of collaborative work.

The data engineering interview loops at Atlassian are fairly standardized, so there’s little variance among each team’s process.  Atlassian tends to prefer data scientists with experience in at least some of the following:

• Big-picture thinking, leadership, and communication skills
• Architecting, transforming, and modeling data
• Big data technologies, distributed systems, and data pipeline design
• Ensuring data quality, governance, and compliance
• Data processing performance tuning and optimization
• Advanced relational databases

What does an Atlassian Data Engineer do?

Depending on the team, data engineers at Atlassian will build and maintain analytical data models and pipelines that affect decision-making across the company. Your work might have a business-wide impact on finance, growth, product analysis, customer analysis, and sales.

While you may work with data scientists, your work is very different from theirs: the models and pipelines you build enable their analysis. At a company as large and distributed as Atlassian, distributed teams work independently and often collaborate to make sure they’re not reinventing the wheel—so make sure you’re able to describe the big-picture priorities of your projects to other teams, who may be potential collaborators.

Atlassian’s remote-first culture, celebration of global talent,  and emphasis on work-life balance make working here extremely competitive, and many Atlassian employees stay at the company longer than employees at comparably sized companies.

Compensation varies based on pay zone. For example, in the US, Zone A mainly includes the San Francisco Bay Area, Zone B includes other major cities like New York and Seattle, and Zone C covers everywhere else.

Before you apply

• Review Python and SQL since both are required for the technical screen.
• Practice speaking about technical concepts in a way that a nontechnical person can understand. Data engineers at Atlassian often pitch and explain their work to leadership, so strong data engineering candidates are “bilingual” in both tech and business.
• Research recent interview questions asked at Atlassian.
• Brush up on cloud platforms, especially AWS, since Atlassian uses it heavily.
• Check out the Atlassian Engineering Blog so you can speak about current works in progress at Atlassian.
• Read the Atlassian Engineering Interview Handbook for tips on their values and manager interviews.

Interview process

Hiring managers mention that for data engineer roles, Atlassian’s hiring process typically takes about 4–6 weeks and typically includes three main interview stages:

1. Recruiter phone screen to ensure you meet the minimum requirements for the role
2. Technical screen to test your proficiency in Python and SQL
3. Onsite interviews, divided into four phases:
   • Two additional coding rounds of escalating difficulty
   • Systems design interview
   • Values interview
   • Hiring Manager interview

Broadly compared to big tech’s philosophy of technical rounds, Atlassian really wants to know about your work’s big-picture, quantifiable business impact.

1. Recruiter screen

The recruiter phone screen is typically a 30-minute call that may include some light technical questions, but usually the focus is on behavioral questions and recruiter logistics questions.

Be ready to talk about your previous work history and skills as they relate to the job description and why you’re passionate about data modeling, distributed systems, and data optimization, as well as the Atlassian suite of software.

Sample questions include:

• Walk me through your resume.
• Why Atlassian?
• What’s your favorite Atlassian software offering, and why?
• What’s your experience managing a team?
• What are you looking for in your next role?
• Tell me about a time you innovated something.
• What was the last decision you made that had a meaningful business impact? What was it, and what was the impact?

2. Technical screen

This is typically a 60-minute assessment via Karat, supervised by another engineer. Depending on the seniority of the role you’re interviewing for, you may be supervised by an Atlassian engineer, or an engineer from the Karat team.

Typically, 30–45 minutes of this interview will be allocated to coding in SQL and Python, with the last 15 minutes as code review. Your interviewer may also ask some quiz-like “what is X” questions while you’re working, so don’t be thrown if this happens. Interviewers generally work from a standardized bank of Python and SQL questions, and want to assess your thinking, as well as your ability to generate functional and clean code.

Topics:

• String and dictionary manipulation in Python
• Data transformation from an API request in Python
• Window functions, cumulative sums, and recursion in SQL
• Spark Optimization
• Hash maps
• Parsing
• Sorting

Sample questions include:

• Fetch data from an API, and create a two-dimensional list to display it in Python, given certain attributes.
• Given a webpage, scrape and save its data in a CSV file.
• Given a list of file paths, print all of the files in each of the folders.
• Follow-up questions:
  • How would you scale this solution?
  • How would you present this SQL to a business stakeholder?
• Can you explain the three primary design schemas relevant to data modeling?
• What are the two main ways to rank data in SQL? What are the use cases for each option?
• Given two subtotals, add them in SQL using built-in functions.

3. Onsites

These five interviews are typically scheduled back-to-back on the same day, and are designed to test your ability to collaborate, communicate, and solve ambiguous problems on time. These are scheduled for 4–5 hours in total. Despite the name, most applicants were able to complete these over Zoom. If you live near an Atlassian office, you may be offered in-person options, but the remote-first culture of Atlassian means you have some flexibility.

a. Two more coding rounds

These two coding rounds, typically an hour long each, will likely be more difficult than your earlier round during the tech screen. These rounds are usually done with a senior data engineer on your prospective team, who will ask follow-up questions, and more theoretical questions throughout.

Unlike interviewers at companies like Instacart, Atlassian technical interviewers are very invested in your processing and communication, so explaining your thinking and asking good questions are valued just as much as writing clean and efficient code.

Topics Include:

• Advanced Python algorithms
• JSON and dictionary parsing functions
• Advanced SQL joins

Questions:

• Design a model for an e-commerce website given parameters.
• Tell me about a recent project you completed using this technology.
• What are some key differences between RDD, dataframes, and datasets?
• What are some key differences between wide and narrow transformations?
• Design the database for a given system (for example, movie ticket bookings or a parking garage) and write an analytical query using tables.
• What is data orchestration, and what tools can you use to perform it?
• How do you ensure data integrity and quality in your data pipelines?
• Why do we use clusters in Kafka, and what are its benefits?
• Given parameters, design an ETL pipeline.

b. Systems design interview

This interview, typically an hour long, is looking to see how you would solve real-world problems affecting Atlassian products. Unlike at other tech companies like Google, which ask broader systems design questions (i.e. “how would you build Netflix end-to-end”), system design at Atlassian tends to dig down into the nitty-gritty of one specific product, issue, or feature.

Interviewers choose from a standardized list of questions that could cover issues from architectural challenges to scaling systems under specific conditions. Atlassian hiring managers will “ladder” these questions (which means their follow-ups may get more difficult) to assess your agility as well as your problem-solving.

Your interviewer will want to see how you’d explore the breadth and depth of an issue—what questions you would ask, how you’d talk through constraints like reliability and cost, who you might partner with for help, and which technologies you’d use. They might also touch on aspects like observability, performance, security, and scalability.

Example question:

• Describe a scalable and fault-tolerant architecture for ingesting, processing, and storing real-time streaming data from diverse sources, ensuring data integrity and efficient querying for analytics purposes.

c. Values interview

The questions asked during this 40–50 minute conversation are designed to test your alignment with Atlassian’s five values. Atlassian hiring managers want candidates to know that values are distinct from culture (which may change from team to team) and as such, your interviewer at this stage likely won’t be from the team you’re looking to join.

Your interviewer will have a standardized set of scenario-based questions to guide your conversation, but they’ll try to keep the tone light and relatively informal while still expecting you to give concrete examples. Your interviewer probably won’t ask any “gotcha” questions, since they want to know about your mindset and how it guides your actions.

Sample questions include:

• How would you react if your team received negative feedback about a part of the project that was entirely assigned to you?
• Describe a successful team project you worked on so far. What was your contribution?
• Describe a situation when you were facing a technical issue and your normal troubleshooting method wasn’t working. What did you do?

d. Manager interview

The questions asked during this 40–50 minute conversation will be more traditional “interview” questions than the values interview, and you may be interviewed by either a solo hiring manager, or the hiring manager and a senior manager from your potential team. They’ll ask questions from a standardized bank to assess not just what you’ve done, but what you’re excited about.

Expect to talk through a past project end-to-end, speaking in detail about technical challenges and quantifiable business impact. You can also expect questions in this round to have a strong emphasis on your communication and collaboration styles.

Sample question:

• Walk me through a project you worked on from start to finish.

Additional resources

• Take our data engineering course to get “interview ready.”
• Get coaching and actionable feedback from data scientists at the level you aspire to land an offer for.
• Practice with mock interviews on the most common types of problems.

FAQs about Atlassian DE interviews

What can I expect from my interview at Atlassian?

You can expect 4–6 weeks of interviews, including:

• A standard recruiter call
• A coding interview in Python and SQL
• An onsite interview with two more coding rounds, a systems design interview, a values interview, and a manager interview

Note that behavioral interviews emphasize communication and collaboration style, and technical interviews emphasize asking good questions.

How long is the typical Atlassian interview process?

Interviews at Atlassian will typically take 4–6 weeks.

How should I prepare for a data engineering interview at Atlassian?

• Prepare to speak on a recent project in a way that’s accessible to business leadership, not just technical experts, and detail its impact on greater business goals.
• Do some open-source projects, with an eye towards bug fixes and code cleanup, and familiarize yourself with both the public and private cloud.
• Make sure you’re able to write clean, efficient Python and SQL.
• Familiarize yourself with Atlassian’s software suite for your systems design interview.
• Read the Atlassian Engineering Interview Handbook for tips on mastering the Atlassian values and manager interview.

Will I have in-person interviews at Atlassian?

Atlassian is a remote-first company with offices around the world. If you live near an office, you may be offered the opportunity to come in, but many candidates complete the entire hiring loop remotely.