Atlassian

I went through the Atlassian Software Engineering Intern recruitment process through an on-campus drive. The first stage was the online coding assessment, which I found considerably more demanding than a typical internship OA. There were multiple DSA problems with a limited amount of time, so I had to decide quickly which questions I could solve confidently and which ones required more time. The assessment included problems around graph algorithms, greedy techniques and binary search in reported versions of the process. One candidate described a 90-minute assessment containing four problems ranging from medium to hard. After clearing the OA, I reached the technical interview. The interview was almost entirely focused on problem solving. Instead of asking several unrelated questions, the interviewer gave me one main problem and then kept changing the requirements through follow-ups. I first explained the straightforward solution and then moved towards the optimized approach. I was expected to justify the data structures I selected and explain the time and space complexity before implementing anything. What made the round interesting was that the interviewer was paying attention to my reasoning while I coded. I had to communicate what I was trying to do, debug my implementation when necessary, and think about corner cases rather than silently writing code. A candidate from an on-campus Atlassian drive reported solving the main problem and subsequent modifications within the allotted hour, including explaining the complexity and handling the edge cases, but still did not progress to the next stage. I also prepared for questions beyond DSA because other on-campus Atlassian reports have included DBMS, OS, OOP and project discussions. One reported interview, for example, covered normalization, ACID properties, joins and deadlocks before moving into the candidate's internship and then a coding problem. In my case, I ultimately received a rejection after the interview process. The result was somewhat unexpected because I felt that my technical performance had been reasonably strong. That was probably the biggest lesson I took from the experience: completing the coding problem correctly does not necessarily guarantee progression. Atlassian's interviews also assess how I communicate, debug, reason through changing requirements and explain previous work. Their own engineering interview guidance emphasizes communication, collaboration and being able to discuss technical challenges from past projects. Overall, the experience was a useful reminder that I should prepare for the complete interview rather than treating the OA as the main hurdle. For a future Atlassian interview, I would spend additional time practicing open-ended DSA questions with follow-ups and explaining my decisions while coding.