After losing his job at Atlassian due to layoffs, former engineer Vasilios Sirakis released a 38-minute YouTube video describing the large-scale system he helped build during his eight years at Atlassian.
Sirakis said he created the video to showcase his work, document completed projects and share lessons learned to help other engineers facing similar situations. “I have been affected by recent layoffs by Atlassian and wanted to take some time to reflect on my time working at Atlassian,” he said at the beginning of the video.
This engineer worked on the infrastructure that handles traffic routing, load balancing, and edge systems across 13 regions. The platform supported thousands of services and large enterprise customers around the world using Atlassian products.
The video was released after the company implemented layoffs related to artificial intelligence investment plans and cost-cutting measures. Instead of posting an emotional reaction to losing his job, Sirakis offered a technical explanation of the system he has built and maintained for nearly a decade.
“During that time, I’ve made a lot of stuff, and I wanted to talk about the things I’ve made, mostly things that I personally found interesting or things that I’m proud of,” he said. He started the video by talking about Atlassian’s hiring process.
The interviews included coding tests, troubleshooting exercises, and technical discussions about cloud systems, DNS routing, microservices, and infrastructure design. Sirakis said he was hired in part because he agreed to build a self-service load-balancing platform for in-house developers.
What is the system created by a former engineer?
Much of Syrakis’ work focused on creating an infrastructure that allows Atlassian developers to automatically provision traffic routing systems without relying on manual setup by operations teams.
He built the Open Service Broker platform to handle requests for load-balanced resources. Developers can submit configuration requests, and the backend system automatically creates DNS records, CloudFront distributions, and traffic routing rules.
This architecture relied on APIs, worker services, asynchronous queues, databases, and dynamically generated proxy configurations. Sirakis said the system used technologies such as Python, Flask, FastAPI, DynamoDB, SQS, Envoy Proxy, CloudFormation, EC2, Route 53, CloudFront, SaltStack, and Kubernetes-related tools.
One of our largest projects involved building an Envoy-based control plane that dynamically generates configuration for proxy servers that run across multiple regions. “We created an opportunity to centralize the logic and address concerns early in the request chain,” Sirakis said.
This infrastructure handled authentication, authorization, rate limiting, logging, and denial-of-service protection before the request reached the backend service. According to Syrakis, Atlassian products such as Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket, and Statuspage eventually migrated to a centralized platform.
We also discussed how the company used machine images, autoscaling groups, security controls, and a long-lived proxy fleet across its AWS infrastructure.
The engineer said his first two years at Atlassian were focused on building the foundation of the platform. “So now if a developer says, ‘I want to run my service and I want it to be accessible on the Internet,’ we’ll say, ‘Yes, no problem,'” he says.
Silakis video details
Sirakis also used the video to talk about software maintenance, mentoring junior engineers, operational stress, and managing conflict within large engineering teams. “It’s easy to build something,” he said. “It’s difficult to change that and be able to change it over time.”
He explained how software systems become harder to maintain as more developers change them over time. He also questioned how AI-generated software will impact future long-term maintenance.
Former engineers discussed the importance of communication and collaboration within technical teams. “I was always available to help,” Sirakis said of the feedback he received from colleagues.
He also talked about mentoring interns and helping teammates understand difficult technical systems by breaking them down into simpler concepts.
According to his LinkedIn profile, Syrakis describes himself as a senior systems engineer, software engineer, site reliability engineer, infrastructure engineer, and platform engineer focused on building maintainable platforms. His profile also lists Rust and WebAssembly as technical interests.
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