Atlassian System Design Interview: Trending Pages Feed

The interviewer opens

Hi, and thanks for joining. Welcome to your interview for the P40 role at Atlassian. We'll design a system together, and you can sketch on the whiteboard on the right of your screen as you talk. If you need to step out or take a break, the Pause button at the top right will pause the interview at any time.

The problem is a trending home feed for a Confluence-like product, and it's in the Problem tab now. Please read through the requirements and ask anything you'd like clarified before you start drawing.

The problem

Design a home page for a Confluence-like product that shows each user the most engaged-with documents across their organisation, leaving out documents the user wrote or has already read.

Must do

• Show each user a ranked list of the most engaged-with documents in their organisation
• Exclude documents the user authored
• Exclude documents the user has already read
• Rankings reflect recent engagement, not all-time totals
• Each organisation's documents and rankings stay separate from other organisations'

Must hold

• The home page must load quickly for every user, even in very large organisations
• Rankings stay reasonably fresh as engagement happens through the day