After losing his job during layoffs at Atlassian, former engineer Vasilios Syrakis released a 38-minute YouTube video describing the large-scale systems he helped build during his eight years at the company.
Syrakis said he made the video to show his work, document the projects he completed, and share lessons that could help other engineers facing similar situations. “I was recently affected by the layoffs made by Atlassian and I wanted to take some time out to reflect on the time that I spent working for Atlassian,” he said at the start of the video.
The engineer worked on infrastructure that handled traffic routing, load balancing, and edge systems spread across 13 regions. The platform supported thousands of services and large enterprise customers using Atlassian products worldwide.
The video appeared after the company carried out workforce reductions tied to artificial intelligence investment plans and cost-cutting measures. Instead of posting an emotional response about losing his job, Syrakis gave a technical walkthrough of the systems he built and maintained over nearly a decade.
“During that time, I built a lot of things and I wanted to talk about what I built, mainly the things that I personally found interesting or that I’m proud of,” he said. He began the video by talking about Atlassian’s hiring process.
The interviews included coding tests, troubleshooting exercises, and technical discussions around cloud systems, DNS routing, microservices, and infrastructure design. Syrakis said one reason he got hired was because he agreed to build a self-service load balancing platform for internal developers.
What systems did former engineer build?
A major part of Syrakis’s work focused on creating infrastructure that allowed Atlassian developers to automatically provision traffic-routing systems without relying on manual setup from operations teams.
He built an Open Service Broker platform that handled requests for load balancing resources. Developers could submit configuration requests, while backend systems automatically created DNS records, CloudFront distributions, and traffic-routing rules.
The architecture relied on APIs, worker services, asynchronous queues, databases, and dynamically generated proxy configurations. Syrakis said the systems used technologies including Python, Flask, FastAPI, DynamoDB, SQS, Envoy Proxy, CloudFormation, EC2, Route 53, CloudFront, SaltStack, and Kubernetes-related tooling.
One of the largest projects involved building an Envoy-based control plane that dynamically generated configurations for proxy servers running across multiple regions. “We created an opportunity to centralize logic and to handle concerns early in the chain of requests,” Syrakis said.
The infrastructure handled authentication, authorization, rate limiting, logging, and denial-of-service protection before requests reached backend services. According to Syrakis, Atlassian products including Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket, and Statuspage eventually moved onto the centralized platform.
He also described how the company used machine images, auto-scaling groups, security controls, and long-lived proxy fleets across AWS infrastructure.
The engineer said the first two years of his time at Atlassian focused heavily on building the foundation for this platform. “So now when a developer says, ‘I want to run my service and I want it to be accessible on the internet,’ we’d say yes, no problem,” he said.
Details of Syrakis’ video
Syrakis also used the video to speak about software maintenance, mentoring junior engineers, operational stress, and managing conflicts inside large engineering teams. “Building something is easy,” he said. “Changing it and making sure that you can still change it over time is difficult.”
He described how software systems become harder to maintain as more developers modify them over time. He also questioned how AI-generated software would affect long-term maintenance in the future.
The former engineer discussed the importance of communication and collaboration inside technical teams. “I was always available to help,” Syrakis said while describing feedback he received from colleagues.
He also spoke about mentoring interns and helping teammates understand difficult technical systems by breaking them 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.