API Project Creation: Custom Global Roles overriding Business Team-Managed templates

[Damiano Di Battista]

Hi everyone,

I am a Jira Org Admin and I’m experiencing an issue where project roles are being "injected" into new projects created via the REST API (POST /rest/api/3/project), ignoring the specified template.

The Goal: Create a Business Team-Managed project with only the standard roles: Administrator, Member, and Viewer.

The Problem: When creating a project via API, the resulting project (which appears as Team-Managed in the UI) automatically includes several Jira Service Management roles (Service Desk Team, etc.) and, most importantly, a Custom Global Role called "Competence Center" that was created at the system level.

If I create the exact same project manually (Business > Task Management > Team-managed), it correctly shows only Admin, Member, and Viewer. The API seems to be bypassing the "Clean" template in favor of a site-wide default scheme.

My Payload:

JSON
{
"key": "NEWPROJ",
"name": "Automated Business Project",
"projectTypeKey": "business",
"projectTemplateKey": "com.atlassian.jira-core-project-templates:jira-core-simplified-task-tracking",
"description": "Created via Automation",
"leadAccountId": "ACCOUNT_ID",
"assigneeType": "PROJECT_LEAD"
}

What I've confirmed:

The API creates the project, but it seems to "merge" the Business template with our global default roles/permissions.

Manually created projects DO NOT inherit these extra roles, only API-created ones do.

Question: Is there a specific flag or a different API endpoint for Jira Cloud to ensure a "Clean" Team-Managed project creation that doesn't inherit global custom roles? Or is there a known bug where the API defaults to a different project-creation-scheme than the UI?

Any help from the community or Atlassian staff would be greatly appreciated!

[Trudy Claspill]

Hello @Damiano Di Battista 

That sounds like a bug to me.

I didn't find anything about that scenario in JAC.

I recommend that you open a support case directly with Atlassian to raise this issue and find out if it is a known defect. Please share here what you learn from Atlassian.

https://support.atlassian.com/contact/#/