Senior Principal Engineer, Search Platform

Working at Atlassian
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Your future team: Search Platform
The Search Platform team is responsible for powering Rovo Search , knowledge discovery and search for humans and agents across all enterprise data. Our mission is to make all our customers' data across Atlassian and their external apps (i.e. third-party applications) searchable securely and reliably through an insanely fast, globally scalable, cost-efficient, enterprise grade search infrastructure. Powering search and discovery in the agentic era is a whole new challenge and this team is at the forefront for Atlassian.
As a Senior Principal Engineer in Search Platform, you will own technical roadmap, execution and outcomes for the Search Data pillar. You will help envision, build and evolve a cutting-edge platform for integrating, processing, indexing and searching massive volumes of unstructured data across 100+ sources. Your deep expertise in large-scale data platforms, streaming and batch processing and distributed systems to solve some of our most complex problems including infrastructure, data and dev/agentic productivity challenges. Data is messy and hard and its the most critical, make or break input for Search and AI.
As a senior technical leader, you will be expected to lead other engineers to define our strategic technical direction, and to own outcomes from design to launch. Your role is pivotal in identifying and driving step-change initiatives, choosing the problems to solve vs not, in order to deliver a world-class end-to-end search experience, powered by rich data which is fresh, reliable across all apps.
Responsibilities:

• Collaborate with technical leads, partner teams and internal customers to define technical strategy and architecture for Search Data.
• Lead the evolution of our data platform and pipelines to meet the demands of both real-time search freshness and AI/agentic retrieval at enterprise scale.
• Make hard architectural trade-offs between freshness, correctness, cost, and operational simplicity - and own the outcomes.
• Drive the simplification and modernization of complex, legacy data processing systems. Identify and eliminate unnecessary complexity. Design systems that are understandable, testable, and operable.
• Establish design patterns and best practices for handling the inherent messiness of real-world data - schema evolution, partial failures, eventual consistency, connector variability, and data quality degradation.
• Own engineering and operational excellence for the health of our systems and processes. Proactively drive opportunities for continuous improvements and own key operational metrics.
• Transform developer productivity to ensure that we unleash the potential of our own team with agents. Champion a culture of high ownership, rigorous testing, safe rollouts, and data-driven engineering across Search Data teams.
• Help hire and mentor engineers to build an open, innovative and operationally responsible culture.

At Atlassian, we strive to design equitable, explainable, and competitive compensation programs. We follow consistent hiring practices and account for each candidate's skills, knowledge, and experience when setting base pay within the range.
This role may also be eligible for benefits, bonuses, commissions, and equity.
Requirements:

• Deep experience with distributed data frameworks (Kafka, Flink, Spark) - you have built, operated, and debugged systems processing billions of events per day. Ideally for Search and AI use cases where innovation relies on iterating over data. You understand their failure modes, not just their happy paths.
• Strong background in designing data architectures that handle messy, heterogeneous data at scale - including schema evolution, data quality, idempotency, backfill/replay, and partial failure recovery.
• Track record of simplifying complex systems. You have taken spaghetti systems and turned them into something engineers can reason about, test, and operate confidently.
• Demonstrated department-level technical leadership, influence across multiple teams, and ownership of top-level technical objectives tied to business outcomes. You identify ambiguity and bring clarity.
• Strong software engineering fundamentals. Fluency in at least one modern language (Java preferred). You write code, review code, and hold a high bar for engineering quality.
• Excellent communication skills. You can explain complex data architecture to engineers, product managers, and leadership with equal clarity.
• 12+ years of experience imagining, building and operating critical systems at scale.

Benefits & Perks
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 .
About Atlassian
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 .
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