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Technically, it does not need a service account, it just needs an account that has access to all the services on the operating system that it needs to be able to use to do the job.
Most of us use service accounts for running Atlassian services because it keeps things secure and simple, but also makes it clear that Bitbucket is a service on that machine. You can glance at a box, see "Bitbucket Service Account" and know that all that account does is run Bitbucket as a service, and restarts it if the machine restarts for some reason.
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