Principal Engineer, Search Platform

About the Position

We are seeking a Principal Engineer, Search Platform to lead the technical vision and delivery for planetary-scale data ingestion and indexing platforms at Atlassian. As a Principal Engineer, you will drive the core indexing engines and enterprise-grade trust capabilities that power Atlassian Search and Rovo.

Working at Atlassian

Atlassians have the flexibility to choose where they work – whether in an office, from home, or a combination of the two. This flexibility allows Atlassians to better support their family, personal goals, and other priorities. We can hire people in any country where we have a legal entity.

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Responsibilities

• Lead Enterprise Trust & Compliance: Own technical strategy and delivery for enterprise requirements - multi-cloud (GCP/AWS), Isolated Cloud, FedRAMP, BYOK encryption, and data residency - making Search a platform enterprises can trust. Proactively simplify architecture and remove complexity.
• Shape the Indexing Platform for AI-era Workloads: Evolve high-throughput, low-latency distributed indexing pipelines to meet the retrieval demands of agentic and AI use cases - freshness, context relevance, and scale across billions of events.
• Connect Across Teams and Systems: Work fluidly across ML, Data, Cloud Infrastructure, and product teams - aligning technical direction, unblocking dependencies, and building shared platform capabilities that multiply the impact of teams beyond your own. Help improve support for building and operating systems that deliver true Enterprise Trust through Atlassian-wide platforms, while actively simplifying the architecture and eliminating accumulated complexity.
• Drive System Efficiency at Scale: Improve ingestion throughput, data freshness, and reliability while optimizing for unit economics through smarter sharding, disaggregated storage, and compute efficiency.
• Capitalize on Agentic Development Advances: Stay ahead of the curve on retrieval architectures, vector/hybrid indexing, and agentic memory patterns - bringing external advances in to accelerate Atlassian's platform and product roadmap.

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Requirements

• Enterprise Platform Experience: 12+ years of demonstrated experience delivering enterprise-grade requirements - tenant isolation, multi-cloud deployments, compliance frameworks (FedRAMP, BYOK, data residency), and zero-downtime migrations at scale.
• Distributed Systems Depth: Proven experience designing and operating large-scale distributed data pipelines, search/indexing systems, or streaming platforms (e.g., Kafka, Flink, OpenSearch/Elasticsearch, object-store-backed indexing, vector search).
• Cross-functional Influence: Experience driving alignment and delivery across multiple teams and systems - someone who is just as effective collaborating and influencing as they are executing independently.
• Speed with Judgment: A track record of making fast, pragmatic trade-offs that deliver near-term value without accumulating long-term technical debt.
• Agentic & AI-Aware Engineering: Familiarity with systems that support AI agents and pragmatic approaches to integrate safe agentic engineering practices for building robust Enterprise grade systems.

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We Offer

Atlassian offers a wide range of perks and benefits designed to support you, your family, and to help you engage with your local community. Our offerings include health and wellbeing resources, paid volunteer days, and so much more. To learn more, visit go.atlassian.com/perksandbenefits.

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About the Company

At Atlassian, we're motivated by a common goal: to unleash the potential of every team. Our software products help teams all over the planet and our solutions are designed for all types of work. Team collaboration through our tools makes what may be impossible alone, possible together.

We believe that the unique contributions of all Atlassians create our success. To ensure that our products and culture continue to incorporate everyone's perspectives and experience, we never discriminate based on race, religion, national origin, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, or marital, veteran, or disability status. All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.

To provide you the best experience, we can support with accommodations or adjustments at any stage of the recruitment process. Simply inform our Recruitment team during your conversation with them.

To learn more about our culture and hiring process, visit go.atlassian.com/crh.

In line with local law, identity verification (which may include use of biometric data) is a condition of employment with Atlassian for employment fraud purposes.