What the round is like
You get about an hour. Questions tend to be product features, like what you'd see in Confluence or Jira, more than giant infrastructure. Candidates say the focus is APIs, the database schema, then scaling, so expect to get specific about how data is stored. Ask clarifying questions up front; one candidate was down-leveled for not asking enough.
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.
Share favorite colors with friends
Users pick a favorite color, connect with friends, and see their friends' colors.
It sounds tiny, which is the point. Candidates say it's mostly about APIs, schema and simple scaling, and one got a twist: now each user can pick three colors.
How it might be asked
Design a system where users pick their favorite color and connect with friends. Each user should see their friends' current favorite colors, and find out when a friend changes theirs.
Key concepts to know
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Show trending pages
A home page showing each person the most popular documents in their company, without ones they wrote or already read.
Ranking is easy to describe and hard to store well, especially when you remove what each person has already seen.
How it might be asked
Design a home page for a Confluence-like product that shows each user the most engaged-with pages across their organization, leaving out pages they wrote or have already read.
Key concepts to know
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Tag content across products
Let people add tags to Jira issues, Confluence pages and other content, and find everything with a tag.
Look-ups go both ways, from an item to its tags and from a tag to its items, and some tags get enormous.
How it might be asked
Design a system that lets people add tags to content across Atlassian products, like Jira issues and Confluence pages. Users should see the tags on any item, find everything with a given tag, and see the 10 most used tags.
Key concepts to know
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Crawl pages for images
A service that takes a list of URLs, crawls them and the pages they link to, and returns the image URLs found on each.
It's a long-running job, so you need to track progress, avoid crawling the same page twice, and handle slow or broken sites.
How it might be asked
Design a web scraping service. A client submits a list of URLs and gets back a job ID. The service crawls those pages and the pages they link to, collects image URLs, and lets the client check job progress and fetch results per URL.
Key concepts to know
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What's really being tested
| Topic | What you're being asked, basically |
|---|---|
| Data model | What are your tables or keys, and which queries do they make fast? |
| Per-user views | How do you personalize results without recalculating everything? |
| Notifications | How do changes reach the people who care about them? |
| Many customers | How do you keep each company's data separate as you grow? |
How to work through a question
- Figure out what you're building. Who's using it, what does it need to do, and what can you ignore?
- Do some rough math. How many requests, how much data, more reads or more writes? Those answers decide a lot.
- Walk through one request. Draw the simplest thing that works before you add anything fancy.
- Pick storage last. Once you know what gets read, how often and how fresh it has to be, the choice gets a lot easier.
- Then try to break it. What happens in a traffic spike? What if a server dies?
Key concepts to know
If you're rusty on any of these, start here.
- Relational vs non-relational databasesPick a database based on how you'll actually use it.
- Caching strategiesMake reads faster, and figure out what to do when data changes.
- Stream processing and windowingCount things in data that never stops coming in.
- Message queues and event streamsKeep services from depending on each other, and handle traffic spikes.
- Sharding and consistent hashingSplit data across machines and keep it balanced.
- Rate limitingStop too much traffic with token buckets and sliding windows.
- Blob storage and CDNsStore big files cheaply and serve them from close to your users.
Sources
We pulled this together from candidates' own write-ups of their interviews. They don't always agree, and things change over time.
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