Working at Atlassian

I've been working in Atlassian for about 3 years, and I know the company inside out. Here is what you should know:

  • Atlassian is very location dependent. There are offices in Australia, United States, Europe and so on. For example, BitBucket and Trello teams are mostly in United States, while "legacy" teams like Jira and Confluence mostly represented by employees in Australia.
  • Atlassian is a remote-first company. Pre-COVID the only Trello team employees were working remotely. Later Atlassian announced that employees will have to make a choice if employees want to go back to the office or not. Most of employees are working remotely now.
  • Atlassian is software company. There are many departments, and the department I have experience working in is Software Engineering.

So you know, we're making this website friendly ;) so anyone can google and find the latest information about how working at Atlassian really looks like.

Working as Software Engineer in Atlassian

You join as P3, P4, P5 or P6 engineer. P7 hire is quite rare. From my years of employment in the organization I haven't seen anyone hired for P2 and below roles. P3 is considered as junior engineer. But let's take a quick look into these roles:

  • P3 - Junior software engineer
  • P4 - Middle software engineer
  • P5 - Senior software engineer
  • P6 - Staff software engineer
  • P7 - Sr. Staff software engineer

One of my friends in Atlassian is P7. I once asked him - "How did you get P7 promotion?". "I didn't get any", - he replied, - "I just joined early enough before we had any PASCAL".

What is PASCAL you ask? Well, you gonna find out. Pretty much it's the levels we've discussed above and responsibilities for each level.

Employee benefits (United States only)

As an employee in United States you're getting:

  • Unlimited PTO
  • Unlimited Sick Days (as they advertise in LinkedIn)
  • Free health insurance coverage for you and all dependents
  • Salary and RSUs

Salary and RSUs

Well, there is information about RSUs and salary on websites like levels.fyi, but the reality is that Atlassian doesn't pay too much. My manager said (exact quote):

From 1 to 10, where 10 is the largest software corporations and 1 is small startups, Atlassian pays somewhere at 6.

But I asked "How do we attract engineers then?" The answer was "by great culture in the company and work life balance".

Just FYI, this exact manager decided to switch from M3 (manager) to P6 position at some point of time. P6 is a Staff Engineer who has (well, should have) quite strong technical background. Funny fact is that I once asked him while we were talking about GUID collisions we had:

How many combinations do we have for a GUID?

The answer was:

I don't think anyone in our teams can actually tell the exact number

Well, it's 16 bytes. So the number of combinations is 2^(8 * 16) with some caveats.

I think it kinda gives you perspective on what kind of the salary you can expect in the organization and why. You should have an idea of the average technical skill level in the organization for a P6 engineer.

Culture and work life balance

Atlassian promotes and emphasizes its caring culture. They introduce small perks like "recharge day" every once in a while, and do other stuff so support their employees, like gym reimbursements (up to $500/year), workspace reimbursement. I even got used chair from the San Francisco office and one broken monitor. I have to admit it worked for one day, and died the next day I switched it on.

Pre-COVID you would find free snacks, drinks, including beer, kombucha and even tap beer. Snacks were like everywhere else, definitely not fancy or something. A pack of small carrots, chips, cold boiled eggs wrapped in plastic. Some veggies and fruits in the morning. You probably won't find anything if you come late enough.

I haven't heard about meal reimbursements for employees who work from home. I have to mention that the company is quite greedy when it comes to money and paying you.

For example, I had no salary bumps in almost 3 years. The inflation rate has eaten a big chunk of my salary over the time, so there were no adjustments to that. Somebody mentioned inflation rate, especially in HCOL areas in All Hands meeting. Atlassian said - "we're going to have performance reviews and your manager will get back to those of you who are eligible [for salary increase]". So salary inflation adjustments are up to your manager's decision.

About Atlassian Shitlassian

I made this website to tell the world about my experience working in Atlassian. This company terminated my employment because my spouse had cancer. You can find my story on the main page.