Senior Principal Machine Learning Systems Engineer, Search Platform

About the Position

Join Atlassian as a Senior Principal Machine Learning Systems Engineer to lead search platform innovations and enhance search capabilities.

Responsibilities

• Design and build high-quality agentic search systems, addressing tail latency, throughput, concurrency, caching, sharding, fault isolation, capacity, and graceful degradation.
• Set the long-term architecture and technical roadmap for online retrieval, index serving, query processing, and ML inference. Turn advances in information retrieval and machine learning into production systems through rigorous evaluation, experimentation, and incremental adoption.
• Establish strong ML production practices spanning offline and online evaluation, experimentation, observability, safe rollout and rollback, model-quality regressions, and incident response.
• Advance production inference for embedding, retrieval, and ranking models through techniques such as batching, quantization, distillation, compilation, and hardware-aware optimization.
• Lead step-change initiatives across multiple teams, simplify fragmented systems, mentor senior engineers, and align technical and product leaders around long-term direction. Uplevel team and platform maturity to best-in-class agentic development practices to accelerate innovation.

Requirements

• 10+ years of relevant experience, including designing and operating large-scale, low-latency search, recommendation, advertising, or retrieval systems.
• Deep ML systems experience, including production inference, model optimization, retrieval and ranking pipelines, evaluation, experimentation, and operations.
• Strong distributed-systems expertise across performance, concurrency, availability, multi-tenancy, capacity planning, observability, and cost efficiency.
• Strong information-retrieval and applied-ML foundations, with practical experience across lexical, semantic, vector, or hybrid retrieval.
• A track record of setting cross-organization technical direction, resolving consequential architecture choices, and delivering through multiple teams and senior technical leaders.
• Strong product and technical judgment: framing important problems, testing hypotheses, comparing alternatives, and stopping investments whose value does not justify their complexity.

We Offer

• Competitive salary ranging from $226,341 - $356,025 per year, depending on the geographic pay zone.
• Comprehensive benefits and perks designed to support you, your family, and your community. To learn more, visit go.atlassian.com/perksandbenefits.

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.