Atlassian Software Engineer Interview: Tackling Challenging Robot Cart Routes

atlassian | Software Engineer | Interview Experience

Interview Date: Not specified
Result: Fail
Difficulty: Average

Interview Process

The interview consisted of a coding assessment followed by a system design discussion. The coding assessment was conducted over a 30-minute period, and the system design portion involved discussing various aspects of a project related to login processes.

Technical Questions

  1. Assemble Robot (HashMap, String)

    • Given a list of robot parts and required parts, find all robots that can be assembled with the required parts.
  2. Cart Routes (Graph, DFS, Adjacency List)

    • Identify all starting locations and possible ending locations for each start location based on a series of directed steps taken by delivery carts.
  3. Popularity Management (Data Structures)

    • Implement functions to increase and decrease the popularity of content, and retrieve the most popular content. The initial time complexity was O(log n), with a follow-up question on optimizing it to O(1) and handling ties in popularity.

Tips & Insights

  • Practice coding problems that involve data structures such as hash maps and graphs.
  • Be prepared to discuss your previous projects and the decision-making processes involved.
  • Familiarize yourself with system design concepts, particularly around user authentication and data flow.