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Design Scalable Product Backends

Last updated: Apr 22, 2026

Quick Overview

This set of prompts evaluates system design competencies including scalability, latency optimization, API and data-model design, consistency and rendering/storage trade-offs, reliability and failure handling, operational monitoring, and asynchronous job processing.

  • medium
  • Atlassian
  • System Design
  • Software Engineer

Design Scalable Product Backends

Company: Atlassian

Role: Software Engineer

Category: System Design

Difficulty: medium

Interview Round: Onsite

Across several system-design rounds, the following prompts were reported. For each, discuss requirements, APIs, data model, scaling, reliability, and failure handling. 1. **Recipe service latency**: Design a recipe application and explain how you would reduce end-to-end latency for common read requests. 2. **User-drawn character platform**: Users draw a character in a client application, and the system must store the drawing and render it back consistently for viewers. Explain the backend representation, storage, rendering pipeline, and serving path. 3. **Large kiosk balance-refill system**: A fleet of about `125,000` kiosks allows users to refill a game card using credit card or cash. Design the backend and discuss device failures, offline behavior, double charging, cash reconciliation, fraud, and monitoring. 4. **Asynchronous image-link extraction service**: Design a REST service where clients submit one or more URLs. The service crawls each page and its sublinks, extracts image URLs, and later allows clients to query whether processing is `in_progress` or `completed` and retrieve the image URLs associated with each top-level URL. Explain the APIs, job model, completion detection, and scaling strategy.

Quick Answer: This set of prompts evaluates system design competencies including scalability, latency optimization, API and data-model design, consistency and rendering/storage trade-offs, reliability and failure handling, operational monitoring, and asynchronous job processing.

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Atlassian logo
Atlassian
Nov 10, 2025, 12:00 AM
Software Engineer
Onsite
System Design
0
0
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Across several system-design rounds, the following prompts were reported. For each, discuss requirements, APIs, data model, scaling, reliability, and failure handling.

  1. Recipe service latency : Design a recipe application and explain how you would reduce end-to-end latency for common read requests.
  2. User-drawn character platform : Users draw a character in a client application, and the system must store the drawing and render it back consistently for viewers. Explain the backend representation, storage, rendering pipeline, and serving path.
  3. Large kiosk balance-refill system : A fleet of about 125,000 kiosks allows users to refill a game card using credit card or cash. Design the backend and discuss device failures, offline behavior, double charging, cash reconciliation, fraud, and monitoring.
  4. Asynchronous image-link extraction service : Design a REST service where clients submit one or more URLs. The service crawls each page and its sublinks, extracts image URLs, and later allows clients to query whether processing is in_progress or completed and retrieve the image URLs associated with each top-level URL. Explain the APIs, job model, completion detection, and scaling strategy.

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