How We Build
Optimisation Tools for Jira: Reducing Configuration Bloat and Enhancing Performance
As Jira Cloud grows to support larger and more complex customers, so does the configuration that powers their work: custom fields, work types (formerly issue types), screens, schemes, and workflows. Over time, many of these entities become unused or redundant. The result is configuration sprawl—slower experiences, heavier data shapes, and higher admin overhead. To scale […]
The bottleneck keeps shifting: What AI is changing about how we build
Over the past few decades in the technology industry, some of the biggest constraints to building products have been about having enough engineers, time, or compute. For the first time, that era is ending. Tech teams are experiencing a revolution unlike anything they’ve seen before. The barriers to entry for building have all but disappeared. […]
Designing In Variables: How Control Panels Accelerate The Way We Design
A year ago, my workflow looked very different. When a design problem opened up, I explored it by hand. Multiple screens. Multiple flows. Sometimes two or three versions of the same interaction just to compare one subtle difference. Divergent ideas spread across endless pages and files. The work helped us think, but it also created […]
Designing AI products you can depend on
Everyone is shipping AI products now, and most look impressive in demos but fail in the messy reality of daily work. The problem often isn’t the model; it’s the product built around it. In this article, I’ll share what I’ve learned building AI products in environments where trust isn’t optional, and what it actually takes […]
Inside Atlassian’s Merge Queues: How we ship faster with fewer incidents
At Atlassian, we use Merge Queues to ship frequent changes with confidence and streamline pull request merges. Across some of our busiest codebases, Merge Queues have sharply reduced incident frequency and turned merging from a stressful bottleneck into a background task. Today, most of our largest repositories rely on Merge Queues—over 70 large repos across […]
Design Technologists: The role that turns creativity into code
At Atlassian, a new kind of role is collapsing the gap between idea and reality and changing how quickly teams can move from ‘what if’ to ‘here it is.’
Streaming Server-Side Rendering in Confluence
Over the past two years the Confluence team has spent a significant amount of time investing into improving performance – halving the 90th percentile latency for completing page loads https://community.atlassian.com/forums/Confluence-articles/Confluence-Performance-Journey-2x-Faster-in-1-Year/ba-p/3097191. One of the big change we have made in the last 12 months has been to introduce React’s new streaming capabilities for server-side rendered (SSR) […]
Behind the scenes of Atlassian’s AI Builders Week
At Atlassian, we are often asked how we are adapting internally to AI and transforming our R&D organization to be AI native. One lever we have used successfully is an event we call AI Builders Week. Each quarter, we bring together hundreds of product managers and designers to learn new AI skills and land tangible […]
Engineering the Forge Billing Platform for Reliability and Scale
Introduction Forge is Atlassian’s cloud app development platform. It’s a serverless, Atlassian-hosted environment that allows developers to extend products like Jira and Confluence, and it powers thousands of apps running inside customer organizations. As Forge grew, we introduced usage-based pricing, so developers only pay for what they use above a free tier. With that shift […]
Creating with Rovo: How We Built a Collaborative AI Canvas
Learn how Rovo’s collaborative AI canvas was engineered—unifying streaming, structure, and agent-powered workflows to build smarter content creation features.
Advancing semantic search for millions of Rovo users
Rovo brings meaning‑aware search, chat, and agents to Jira, Confluence, and your connected tools, so teams can quickly find the right artifacts and move forward with confidence. Instead of forcing you to remember exact titles or ticket IDs, Rovo focuses on what you mean. This makes all the difference between wading through pages of loosely […]
How Rovo helps teams start work 30% faster
After a year of our users leveraging Rovo’s AI capabilities within Jira, we analysed usage data to identify if and how users’ productivity had been impacted. We found that users who adopted Rovo’s AI capabilities within Jira started work 30% faster and ultimately get an extra day of productivity each month — time that can be […]
Building a more resilient, multi-region Bitbucket Cloud
2025 was an impactful year for Bitbucket Cloud. As we enter 2026, Bitbucket will be continuing this momentum by making architectural improvements aimed at two goals: improving scalability and resiliency, and laying the foundation for Bitbucket Cloud data residency, starting with the European Union in December 2026 and India in June 2027. What does this […]
How we catch and mitigate performance regressions at scale in Jira Cloud
In a huge, multi-tenant product like Jira Cloud, a “small” change anywhere in the system can quietly make life harder for some of our biggest customers, long before our global metrics show a problem. Feature flags, gradual rollouts, and tenant-specific data and traffic shapes mean these regressions often only affect certain slices of Jira (e.g., […]
How We Unlocked Performance at Scale with Jira Platform
Introduction: Jira Cloud is undergoing a substantial rearchitecture, moving its foundation to a cloud‑native, multi‑tenant platform built for massive scale, speed, and reliability. In this post, we’ll take you behind the scenes on why we’re making these changes, the architectural principles guiding us, and describe the services we are building to deliver consistently fast reads, […]