Principal Software Engineer

About the Position

We are seeking a Principal Software Engineer with over 10 years of experience to lead Atlassian's Kubernetes, compute, and AI/ML infrastructure platform. Our mission is to unleash the potential of every team by providing a secure, reliable, cost-efficient, and globally distributed compute platform.

About the Company

Atlassian's mission "to unleash the potential of every team" guides everything we do. Our products, including Jira, Confluence, and Bitbucket, help teams work better together, from NASA to Cochlear. Our office is in Bengaluru, but eligible candidates can work remotely across India.

About the Team

The KubePlat group in Core Engineering owns Atlassian's entire Kubernetes ecosystem. We build and operate the clusters, platform services, and deployment systems that run every Atlassian cloud product, including Jira, Confluence, Loom, and Rovo. Our mission is to provide Atlassian with a secure, reliable, cost-efficient, and globally distributed compute platform as the foundation for building great products.

Responsibilities

• Define the architecture and multi-year roadmap for a multi-cloud, cell-based Kubernetes fleet that scales to thousands of clusters.
• Design Kubernetes-native control planes (controllers, operators, CRDs, and policy) that give engineers self-serve compute, networking, and cloud resources.
• Raise platform reliability and security: reduce blast radius, build safe progressive rollouts, define SLOs, isolate workloads, and support compliance (e.g., FedRAMP).
• Lead compute efficiency through autoscaling, bin packing, capacity planning, and cost optimization.
• Build the AI/ML infrastructure ecosystem on Kubernetes: GPU compute at scale, high-bandwidth, low-latency networking, and high-performance parallel filesystems for training and inference.
• Influence engineering and product leaders globally, set architectural standards, and mentor senior engineers.

Requirements

• 10+ years building and operating large-scale cloud infrastructure or platform-as-a-service systems.
• Deep, hands-on Kubernetes expertise from running it in production at scale: internals, networking, multi-tenancy, and building operators and CRDs.
• Strong experience with AWS and/or GCP (EKS/GKE) and distributed systems design.
• Strong programming skills in one or more languages such as Go, Python, Java, or similar.
• Platform engineering experience with Infrastructure as Code, GitOps/CD (e.g., Terraform, Crossplane, ArgoCD) and observability.
• A track record of leading technical direction across teams, with excellent communication and mentoring skills.

Nice to Have

• Experience with Kubernetes fleet management, cell-based architectures, sandboxing (gVisor, Firecracker), or regulated environments.
• Experience providing AI/ML infrastructure: GPU clusters, high-bandwidth networking (e.g., RDMA, InfiniBand, AWS EFA, GPUDirect), or parallel filesystems (e.g., Lustre, Amazon FSx for Lustre, GCP Parallelstore).
• Contributions to CNCF open-source projects.

We Offer

• Opportunity to work in a dynamic and innovative environment.
• Flexible work arrangements: work from home, from an office, or somewhere in between (TEAM Anywhere).
• Be part of a global team that is shaping the future of cloud-native and AI/ML infrastructure.

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