•SYSTEM DESIGN
Atlassian System Design Questions
Every system design problem candidates reported at Atlassian between September 2025 and September 2026, most-asked first. Each one links to a full solution.
Problems
11
Candidate reports
11
Asked more than once
—
all reported once
Question type
11 HLD
Design Monitoring and Reliability for 99.99% Availability
Design an internal metrics monitoring platform like Datadog or Prometheus. Agents on hosts and services emit metrics (counters, gauges, histograms with tags); the system ingests millions of data points per second, stores them as…
Design a distributed rate limiter service
Design a distributed rate limiter that protects APIs by limiting requests (or consumed units such as LLM billing tokens or storage quota) per user, API key, tenant, or IP. It must support configurable rules (e.g., 100…
Design a simple greeting-card web app
Design a simple web application (MVP) for creating and sending greeting cards: users choose a template, customize the message and images, and send the card to a recipient by email or link, who can view it. Discuss the minimal…
Design a Data Stream Processor
Design a real-time data stream processor: ingest a high-throughput stream of events, validate and transform them, compute aggregations over time windows, and output results to downstream sinks. Requirements: ordering where…
Design a scalable chatbot platform
Design a ChatGPT-style conversational AI product. Users send a message and receive a streamed response from a model; conversations persist and can be resumed on any device; the service must stay highly available despite limited,…
Diagnose why a scaled system became slow
A production service has become slow after scaling up (or a single-node web server is down). Walk through how you would diagnose the problem: which metrics, logs and traces you would check, how you would form and test hypotheses…
Compute top-N posts in a workspace
Design a system that continuously computes the top K items from a very large event stream: for example the K most-viewed URLs, the K services with the most error logs in the last 5 minutes, the top 100 most active users in a…
Design an image crawler for unlimited URLs
Design a distributed web crawler that starts from seed URLs and crawls about 10 billion pages (or all images reachable from given root URLs), with periodic recrawls. It must avoid fetching the same URL twice, obey robots.txt and…
Design an access control system (RBAC + resource-based)
Design an authorization system that supports both role-based access control (users and groups have roles such as Admin, Editor or Viewer that grant permissions) and resource-level ACLs (individual resources grant or deny specific…
Design a tagging system and REST APIs
Design a tagging system (like tags on Confluence pages or Jira issues) with a strong focus on REST API design. Support creating, renaming and deleting tags; attaching and detaching one or more tags to entities; listing tags for…
Store a hierarchy and return all children
Design a service that stores a hierarchical tree (or forest) of nodes and exposes APIs to add a node under a parent, move a subtree, delete a node, and return all descendants (all children at any depth) of a node efficiently.…
Duplicate reports of the same problem are merged and counted.
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What system design questions does Atlassian ask?
Candidates reported 11 distinct system design problems at Atlassian between September 2025 and September 2026, including Design Monitoring and Reliability for 99.99% Availability, Design a distributed rate limiter service, Design a simple greeting-card web app.
How to prepare for Atlassian system design interview?
Start with the Atlassian problems reported most often, work through each full solution, then practice explaining a design end to end under time pressure in a mock interview.
What is the difference between HLD and LLD at Atlassian?
HLD (High-Level Design) focuses on system architecture, scalability, and component interactions. LLD (Low-Level Design) dives into class diagrams, API contracts, and database schemas. Atlassian tests both.