What to work through
Work through a Jira board as a spoken system design interview. Start by clarifying the scope, sketch a working design and explain the trade-offs behind your choices.
- Show a board of columns, each a list of cards in order
- Drag a card within its column or to another column, and undo a move
- Open a card to read and edit its details
- Move a card without dragging, by a click, a tap or the keyboard
Constraints to discuss
- A drag or a click answers within 200 milliseconds
- The first cards show within 2.5 seconds
- A column of 1,000 cards still scrolls and drags smoothly
- Every drag has a single-pointer alternative with no dragging (WCAG 2.2, 2.5.7, level AA), and works by keyboard
Need a starting point?
Watch for these common gaps as you prepare:
- Nesting full cards inside columns, so one edit must be found and copied in several places
- Whole-number positions that renumber a whole column on each move
- Showing a move at once with no plan for the server refusing it
- Treating keyboard dragging as the whole accessibility answer
- Drawing every card of a long column in the page
Why this question is in the collection
These sources connect the problem to company interview reports or preparation guides. They do not guarantee what a company will ask you.
- Atlassian: A senior frontend (P5) candidate in Bangalore, in a write-up published August 2023, reports round 4 as a Trello board with three states, focused on the data model, the request and response payloads, and normalised state.
- Atlassian: A frontend tip from August 2025 calls "design a Jira sprint board" the most frequent system design question lately.
- Atlassian: A frontend engineer reports "Design JIRA board" as the system design round of a six-round loop, about May 2026.
- Oracle: An SDE-3 tip for Oracle Cloud Infrastructure from June 2025: round 4, system design, the frontend of a Jira board.
- Lean Technologies: A senior frontend candidate reports a Jira board as the second-round system design question, about February 2026.
- UiPath: Listed by PracHub in August 2026 as a frontend engineer onsite question, the state of a three-column work board, with no candidate narrative.