Atlassian Senior Software Engineer Interview Experience — Shortest Unique Substrings for UI Shortcuts

Atlassian·Software Engineer·Aug 2026
Technical ScreenSenior+medium

In a Web UI dropdown, users needed help quickly memorizing keyboard shortcuts. For every string in an input list, find its shortest unique substring and wrap that substring with the tags <u> and </u>. Implement a function that performs this transformation.

The detailed requirements were:

  1. Uniqueness: The chosen substring must not appear anywhere as a substring of any other string in the input list.

  2. Shortest length: Among all unique substrings, choose one with the smallest length.

  3. Conflict handling: If several shortest unique substrings have the same length, choose the one that appears earliest in the original string.

  4. Case-insensitive matching: Ignore case when matching substrings and checking uniqueness.

  5. Preserve the original: In the returned list, every character must retain its original capitalization, and the order of the list must remain the same as the input.

Example:

Input:  ["Bird", "Cat", "Cow", "Dog", "Wallaby"]
Output: ["B<u>i</u>rd", "Ca<u>t</u>", "<u>Co</u>w", "Do<u>g</u>", "Wa<u>l</u>laby"]

Published

Curated and edited by PracHub

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Interview at a glance

Company
Atlassian
Role
Software Engineer
Level
Senior+
Rounds
Technical Screen
Difficulty
medium
Interview date
Aug 2026
Questions from this interview
1 question

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