Real, anonymized candidate journeys from recent (2025) Atlassian engineering loops — round by round, including what was asked, how the candidate approached it, and the outcome.
One complete journey, start to finish
Telephonic Screening
Experience discussion, LRU cache design, and a system-design conversation on collaborative document editing and file storage with search.
Values Round
Situational questions tied to the company's stated values.
Leadership Craft Round
Behavioral questions on prior leadership experience.
System Design Round
Design a web-scraping system for URL crawling and image extraction with specific API endpoints.
Code Design Round
A movie-scheduling problem — deciding whether new films fit an existing cinema schedule within fixed operating hours.
Data Structures Round
An employee-hierarchy closest-parent-group problem solved via a lowest-common-ancestor approach.
Key takeaway: Preparation in hierarchical/tree data structures pays off — this candidate spent too much time re-explaining basic tree concepts in the final round, and ultimately declined a downlevel offer after a weak showing in that coding round.
More real interview journeys
The first round of each journey below is shown in full; the rest of each candidate's journey — every remaining round, verbatim — is part of the Placement-Ready PYQ Kit.
Round 1 (DSA)
Closest-department graph/LCA problem — no hire, dinged for missing edge cases and no clarifying questions.
🔒 2 more rounds — continue this journey in the full kit
Karat Elimination Round
Two easy/medium DSA problems plus five situational system-design questions on distributed systems.
🔒 5 more rounds — continue this journey in the full kit
Karat Screening
Five system-design questions plus two DSA questions — hire.
🔒 5 more rounds — continue this journey in the full kit