Top Atlassian Behavioral Interview Questions
1. Core Values Fit
Atlassian has 5 values:
- Open company, no bullshit
- Build with heart and balance
- Don’t #@!% the customer
- Play, as a team
- Be the change you seek
They’ll often ask things like:
Questions:
- “Tell me about a time you disagreed with a teammate. How did you handle it?”
- “Have you ever had to give or receive difficult feedback?”
- “How do you ensure transparency and openness in your work?”
- “What’s a change you initiated at work and why?”
- “How do you balance delivering fast with delivering quality?”
STAR Tip:
In the Action section, highlight collaboration, humility, or initiative — not just execution.
2. Teamwork & Collaboration
Collaboration is huge at Atlassian. They want to see that you’re team-first, not ego-first.
Questions:
- “Describe a time when you worked on a cross-functional team.”
- “Tell me about a time you helped a teammate succeed.”
- “Have you ever had to resolve conflict on your team?”
- “When working with a difficult stakeholder, how did you manage expectations?”
STAR Tip:
Use examples that show empathy, flexibility, and ownership — especially when tension is involved.
3. Ownership & Leadership
Even as an IC (Individual Contributor), they want to see leadership qualities.
Questions:
- “Tell me about a time when you took ownership of a problem others ignored.”
- “Describe a project where you led the technical direction.”
- “Have you ever missed a deadline? What did you learn?”
- “What do you do when priorities suddenly shift?”
STAR Tip:
Show how you lead with influence, not just authority. Share the reasoning behind your decisions.
4. Customer-Centric Thinking
Their motto “Don’t #@!% the customer” is no joke. Expect product empathy questions.
Questions:
- “Tell me about a time you fixed a customer pain point that wasn’t on the roadmap.”
- “How do you make trade-offs between user experience and technical complexity?”
- “Have you ever pushed back on a product requirement? Why?”
STAR Tip:
Make the Result about user value — e.g., “This reduced support tickets by 40%.”
5. Adaptability & Growth
They want engineers who continuously improve themselves and their teams.
Questions:
- “Tell me about a time you failed. What did you learn?”
- “Describe a situation where you had to quickly learn something unfamiliar.”
- “What’s something new you’ve learned recently that impacted your work?”
STAR Tip:
Don’t shy away from failure — show how you grew.
Bonus: Questions You Can Ask Them
Have these ready for the final few minutes:
- “How does Atlassian support engineering growth and learning?”
- “Can you share an example of how the team lives the ‘Be the change you seek’ value?”
- “How are teams structured around products like Jira or Confluence?”
- “How do you balance technical debt with delivering features?”
Sample Answers:
1. “Tell me about a time you disagreed with a teammate. How did you handle it?”
Value: Play, as a team / Open company, no bullshit
S: On a backend team, we were discussing whether to use a document-based database or stick with relational for a new service. One teammate pushed hard for MongoDB due to flexibility.
T: I disagreed, as the data was relational in nature and we needed transactional guarantees.
A: I scheduled a design review with the team to walk through real data access patterns, projected scale, and failure scenarios. We reviewed trade-offs collaboratively, not competitively. I also acknowledged the pros of MongoDB and proposed Postgres with JSONB support as a hybrid solution.
R: The team aligned on Postgres with schema flexibility and strong consistency. It was a respectful decision process, and we shipped on time with no major incidents. The teammate later thanked me for handling it constructively.
2. “Tell me about a time you failed. What did you learn?”
Value: Build with heart and balance / Be the change you seek
S: At a previous job, I led the implementation of a caching layer to speed up API responses. We deployed without adding proper cache invalidation logic.
T: Within a few hours, users reported stale data and incorrect UI behavior. I had to figure out how to fix this fast.
A: I owned the mistake publicly, quickly disabled the cache, and worked with the team to add unit/integration tests for data freshness. Then I wrote a short RFC outlining how we could do smarter cache invalidation using message queues.
R: We implemented the updated design, which reduced API latency by 60% without stale data issues. More importantly, it built trust — I showed accountability, and the team knew we could safely experiment and learn.
3. “How do you make trade-offs between user experience and technical complexity?”
Value: Don’t #@!% the customer
S: We were building a new workflow UI in our internal Jira instance. Product wanted to add live status updates using long-polling and real-time visual indicators.
T: The architecture for real-time updates was complex and would delay delivery by 2 sprints.
A: I met with product and proposed a hybrid: we would poll every 30 seconds for status updates, which was much easier to implement. Meanwhile, we would track usage to see if users really needed live updates.
R: The simpler version shipped on time and met 90% of the user need. Only 5% of sessions showed a need for live updates, so we avoided unnecessary work. This let us focus on more impactful improvements based on usage data.
4. “Tell me about a time you helped a teammate succeed.”
Value: Play, as a team
S: A junior engineer on our team was struggling with debugging a production incident involving race conditions in our task scheduler.
T: They were hesitant to ask for help, but I noticed they were working late trying to fix it alone.
A: I paired with them the next morning, helped break the problem into testable components, and walked them through using a deterministic scheduler to reproduce the issue. I encouraged them to present the root cause and fix in the next team demo.
R: They not only fixed the issue but gained confidence. They started taking on more complex issues afterward and became one of the most dependable team members. I also learned the value of mentoring without taking over.
5. “Tell me about a change you initiated.”
Value: Be the change you seek
S: Our CI pipeline was taking ~30 minutes per build, slowing down feedback loops and productivity.
T: I wanted to optimize it without compromising test coverage.
A: I analyzed the pipeline and discovered redundant integration tests and sequential steps that could run in parallel. I created a proof of concept that brought the runtime down to 12 minutes and wrote a migration guide for the team.
R: The team adopted the new pipeline over the next sprint. It saved ~6 hours of developer wait time per day across the team. It also sparked a mini-effort to audit our build tooling more frequently.
