System design (HLD) rounds at Atlassian favor grounded, product-shaped prompts — an internal tags system, a per-user preferences store — over abstract "design Twitter" templates, and interviewers push specifically on where your design would bottleneck first as scale increases.
Problem 1Design an Internal Tags-Management System
Design an internal system that lets teams create, look up, and reuse tags across an Atlassian-scale product. The interviewer will push on where your design would bottleneck as tag creation and lookup volume grows.
- Cover API design for creating, searching, and attaching/reusing tags.
- Cover a database schema choice and justify it against the read/write pattern you expect.
- Be ready to name the specific component that would bottleneck first at scale, and how you'd address it (sharding, caching, read replicas, etc.).
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The full architecture, API design, data model and scaling discussion for this is part of the Placement-Ready PYQ Kit.
1 more system design prompt with a full architecture writeup in the full Placement-Ready PYQ Kit