Atlassian Interview and How I blew it!

If you are familiar with tools like JIRA, confluence, bit bucket etc. then you probably know the scale of Atlassian. The Australian tech giant now has offices in 13 countries across the globe. Trello is a subsidiary of Atlassian and early this year I interviewed with them. This was not a major hiring drive and I appeared for a specific role to be backfilled for the team. Here are the details of my experience.

Quick Overview

Role : Engineering Manager

Location: Newyork, US

Applied Through: LinkedIn

Total interviews: 6(1 Screening +5 onsite interviews)

Duration: 2 weeks

Result: No Offer

Overall Experience: 4/5

Applying for the role

I applied for the position at Atlassian via LinkedIn which redirected me to the job on Atlassian career website. I got a response from an HR within a week via Email. LinkedIn is probably the easiest way to apply as it has more filtered recommendations based on your profile. The HR then setup a quick call to go over my background and explained the interview process. He was pretty helpful and quick to respond. I was also told the salary range upfront.

Screening Interview

The Screening interview was with one of the EMs in the Trello team for around 45 mins. These were situation based questions and exploration of my background. There was quite a bit of focus on my management philosophy, How I maintain high standards within the team and concrete examples were expected for most of the questions. The interviewer was also curious about the product I was working on and how I balanced my priorities between management work and technical leadership. There were no technical questions in this interview. No deep dive into technical architecture of existing projects as well. This was purely leadership and conversational interview!

Onsite Interviews

I got a positive response within the same day. the recruiter also gave me a detailed feedback and told me that I was marked as a strong hire! I was then introduced to a different HR who explained me the next steps and helped me setup my final rounds of interview.

Overall there were 5 interviews. All were conversational interviews. There was no coding interview or an Abstract System Design interview.

Interview 1(Team Delivery)

This was an interview with an Engineering Manager for about 60 mins. The central theme for the interview was “How I would build and maintain a high performing team?” There were variety of STAR approach based questions. The questions were around formulating Team Mission and Vision, defining annual goals, breaking them down into projects and stories, formulating the right mix of team members to deliver it and pivoting when the requirements change. Other questions included:

• How do you build trust with the team members?
• How would you manage a team that you did not hire?
• What would you differently if the team is not performing to full potential?
• How would you avoid burnouts in the team?

Interview 2(Atlassian Values)

This is a 45 min behavioral interview to seek a cultural fit at Atlassian. I met Customer Success Manager and we discussed all core values of Atlassian. The discussion started by interviewer enquiring which cultural value resonated the most with me. “Don’t #@!% the customer” was my response and I was asked to elaborate with an example from my past. One by one we went through each of the values with me providing my point of view on them followed by an example from my past experience. These core values were shared to me in priori by the HR and I was asked to prepare them for the interview.

My word of advice would be to note that these are not isolated values and each value implicates the other in some way.

Your examples indicating an overlap with more than one of these would get you a few extra points. My interviewer appreciated this observation of mine.

Interview 3( Leadership and People Management)

This was a 60 min interview for exactly what its verbatim for, People Management. My interview couldn’t make it, so I ended up meeting the same interviewer I met during my screening :) The questions were around my existing team size and structure. My tenure as a people manager and my biggest mistakes/learnings as a people manager. There were also a few standard questions on leadership like:

• Have you ever had to manage a low performer?
• How often do you have a 1–1 with your reports? Do you follow a template for it?
• How do you approach promotions for your directs?
• Have you ever had to deal with a difficult employee?
• Your greatest win as a Manager

The interview went pretty well. Interviewer and I were familiar with each other’s background and last few minutes were mostly about the team, the work and where would I fit if I join.

Interview 4 (Software Delivery)

This was a 60 min interview with a Director of Engineering. This was probably what I would call an interview closest to a technical interview. I am also pretty sure that this is where things went south for me :)

There were no abstract questions or tough questions here. I was asked to explain a project from my past where I had improved the process of delivering software in production, improving it in terms of time, reliability or scale. Honestly, I wasn’t very clear on expectation and I don’t particularly have experience in this domain. My past experience have been closer to the product and feature development. I knew of the work done by peer teams in one of my previous projects to move to a cloud based environment but I wasn’t directly involved in the process. Hence, my understanding was limited. Instead of being candid about it, I ended up discussing that project. THAT was a BIG mistake.

I could not explain many intricate details. I was trying to steer the conversation away from the Engineering Improvements side to product but that didn’t work!

After not so great 30 mins or so, we moved to some other questions. These were also around Engineering improvements and product reliability. We discussed testing pyramid in some details, system health monitoring and alerting. This part of the interview was better but I had a feeling that the damage was done.

My word of advice here would be to prepare a couple of diverse projects in-depth, ask clarifying questions and politely state what you have or haven’t worked on. The attempt to explain a project where I wasn’t hands-on and knew only cursory details blew my interview.

Interview 5(Stakeholder Interview)

This was the final interview with two product managers for 60 mins. This was discussion around how I worked with product and other stakeholders. There were questions on managing deadlines, working with abstract requirements and balancing non-functional requirements with business needs.

• How do you communicate if a deadline could not be met?
• What would you do to ensure better planning in such cases?
• How would you break down product requirement to the technical team and vice versa?
• How would you resolve conflicts across org and teams?
• Have you ever worked directly with a customer on an issue?
• Have you been part of customer requirement gathering and interviews?

In last few minutes, We discussed the product roadmap for 2023 for Trello at a high level.

After the Interview

I did not hear back from Atlassian for more than a week, at which point, it was evident that I did not make the cut. I enquired from the HR after another few days and got a standard rejection mail without much feedback.

Final Thoughts

Atlassian interview for Engineering Managers are not very technical, however the interviewers are! The company has a great culture and the interviews are conducted very professionally. The pay and benefits are good and expectations are clarified upfront(at least in my case, they were).

I hope this helps anyone who is preparing. Good Luck :)