What the rounds are like
| Stage | What people usually describe |
|---|---|
| Screen | Usually Karat: 1 or 2 easy to medium problems after quick design questions. Some get a call with an Atlassian engineer instead |
| Data structures | A LeetCode-style problem with a scale-up follow-up, about 60 minutes |
| Code design | Build something small, working and easy to extend, in your own IDE, with unit tests |
In both rounds, people say communicating matters a lot. Explain your thinking, ask clarifying questions, and talk through the complexity. Code needs to run, and one candidate got a no-hire on code design partly for skipping unit tests and error handling.
What people have been asked
These come up in candidates' own write-ups of their interviews. We wrote the example prompts ourselves, so the wording you get will be different.
Find the closest shared group
Groups form a hierarchy and each employee is in one group. Find the closest group a set of employees all share.
It's a lowest common ancestor problem in disguise, with more than two people to handle. A common follow-up lets groups have more than one parent, or employees sit in more than one group.
How it might be asked
Our employee directory arranges groups in a hierarchy, and each employee belongs to one group. Given a set of employees, return the closest group that all of them share.
Key concepts to know
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Common ancestor in a page tree
A candidate got an n-ary tree and had to find the lowest common ancestor of pairs of leaves.
Answering lots of queries means thinking about what to work out once up front.
How it might be asked
Confluence pages form a tree where every page except the root has one parent. Given many pairs of pages, return the lowest common ancestor of each pair.
Key concepts to know
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Build a snake game
A code design classic, with a twist: the snake only grows after every nth piece of food.
They're judging how you split it into objects and how easy it'd be to change. The growth rule varies (every nth food, or every few moves), and some versions wrap around the edges instead of ending at walls.
How it might be asked
Build a snake game with a nextMove(direction) function. Keep track of the board, the snake and the food. The snake only grows after it's eaten n pieces of food, and the game ends if it hits a wall or itself.
Key concepts to know
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Rank agents by rating
Collect ratings for support agents and return each agent's average, highest first.
Easy to start, then follow-ups add ratings per month, tie-breaking and handling ratings coming in at the same time.
How it might be asked
Build a rating system for customer support agents. Record ratings as they come in, and return every agent with their average rating, ordered from highest to lowest.
Key concepts to know
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The code design round
Candidates report getting snake, agent ratings and rate limiters. The focus is on organizing your code well: the right objects, clean functions, and an implementation that's easy to extend. Recent reports say you set it up in your own IDE and write unit tests too.
It can run long. One candidate who'd practiced the exact problem still went 5–10 minutes over, so keep moving and don't polish too early.
How to approach a problem
- Say it back and ask questions. How big is the input? What are the edge cases? What should you return?
- Start with brute force. Say it out loud with its complexity so you've got something to beat.
- Figure out what it really is. Is this secretly a graph? Would sorting help? Do the same subproblems keep coming up?
- Write it and test it. Walk through an example, then try the weird cases.
Key concepts to know
- Trees and recursionSolve tree problems by deciding what each node returns.
- Object-oriented designSplit a small program into classes that are easy to change.
- Hash maps and sliding windowsSwap nested loops for a single pass.
- Heaps and priority queuesAlways have the smallest or largest item ready.
- Graph traversal and shortest pathsBFS, DFS and Dijkstra, and when to use each.
Sources
We pulled this together from candidates' own write-ups of their interviews. They don't always agree, and things change over time.
- LeetCode Discuss: P40 Bangalore offer (Sep 2025)
- LeetCode Discuss: Senior SWE P50 offer (2025)
- LeetCode Discuss: P50 experience (Jan 2025)
- LeetCode Discuss: P50 experience (Jul-Aug 2025)
- LeetCode Discuss: P40 hold (Aug 2025)
- LeetCode Discuss: P60 rejected (Sep 2025)
- Substack: Atlassian P40 offer (2025)
- Blind: New Atlassian coding rounds (2023)
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