ATLASSIAN · SYSTEM DESIGN

Atlassian system design interview questions

Every level gets a code design (LLD) round where you build and extend working code. P40 and above add an HLD round, usually framed around collaboration products like issue trackers and wikis. At P50 and P60 the bar shifts to deep trade-offs, scaling and cross-team impact.

From public candidate reports and Atlassian's careers pages, checked November 2026. Processes vary by team. AlgoRung is not affiliated with Atlassian.

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Which levels get a design round

Level	Atlassian title	Design round	Low-level design
SDE 1	P30 Graduate / entry Software Engineer	Usually not	Yes
SDE 2	P40 Software Engineer	Yes	Yes
Senior Software Engineer (SDE 3)	P50 Senior Software Engineer	Yes	Yes
Staff Software Engineer	P60 Principal, P70 and above	Yes	Yes

Design questions candidates report

Distributed rate limiter for a public API

A LADDER walkthrough of a rate limiter shared by many gateway servers: requirements, scale math for half a million requests a second and ten million keys, the rule and response API, Redis state, then the deep dives: choosing token bucket, atomic updates with a Lua script, keeping the added latency under a millisecond, sharding and hot keys, failing open, multiple regions and rolling out new rules safely.
Full walkthrough: Rate limiter Practise on the design board
Notification service for an issue tracker

How to design a shared notification service that any team can call: one API for push, SMS, email and in-app, user preferences and quiet hours, templates, separate priority queues so a marketing blast never delays a login code, per-provider rate limits, retries with backoff, deduplication, dead device tokens, bulk campaign fan-out and delivery tracking.
Full walkthrough: Notification system
Real-time collaborative editor

A LADDER walkthrough of a collaborative document editor: requirements, scale math for millions of concurrent editors, the API and an operation-log data model, then the hard parts: why concurrent edits conflict, operational transformation versus CRDTs, one session server per document, durability with an op log and snapshots, failover, offline edits, live cursors, version history and permissions.
Full walkthrough: Google Docs
Tagging system with popular tags

How to find the top K most viewed items over the last minute, hour and day at a hundred thousand events a second: why one heap on one machine fails, partitioning counts by item so local top-Ks merge exactly, two-stage aggregation for viral items, sliding windows from tumbling buckets, count-min sketch for bounded memory, a fast stream path checked by an exact batch path, and what "trending" should mean.
Full walkthrough: Top K (trending)

Also reported

Popularity tracker with tie-breaks (LLD)

How to answer any design question: the LADDER method · How the design round is scored by level · Low-level design and machine coding

Questions people ask

When does Atlassian ask system design?

A design round is part of the loop for SDE 1 (P30 Graduate / entry Software Engineer), SDE 2 (P40 Software Engineer), Senior Software Engineer (SDE 3) (P50 Senior Software Engineer), Staff Software Engineer (P60 Principal, P70 and above). Every level gets a code design (LLD) round where you build and extend working code. P40 and above add an HLD round, usually framed around collaboration products like issue trackers and wikis. At P50 and P60 the bar shifts to deep trade-offs, scaling and cross-team impact.

What system design questions does Atlassian ask?

Candidates report: Distributed rate limiter for a public API; Notification service for an issue tracker; Real-time collaborative editor; Tagging system with popular tags; Popularity tracker with tie-breaks (LLD).

System design questions at other companies

System design questions across all companies · Behavioral questions