Principle Software Engineer

Working at Atlassian

Atlassians can choose where they work – whether in an office, from home, or a combination of the two. That way, Atlassians have more control over supporting their family, personal goals, and other priorities. We can hire people in any country where we have a legal entity. Interviews and onboarding are conducted virtually, a part of being a distributed-first company.

• Our Mission: We are driven by a common mission—to unleash the potential of every team. Our collaboration and productivity software (Jira, Confluence, Loom, Rovo, Bitbucket, and more) powers over 300,000 customers worldwide.

• Team Anywhere: We operate as a distributed-first company. Team Anywhere gives employees the autonomy and flexibility to choose how and where they work best, balancing work with personal and family priorities through asynchronous practices, clear rituals, and intentional connection.

• Our Core Values:

  • Open Company, No Bullshit: We foster transparency, honest feedback, and direct communication.

  • Play, as a Team: We prioritize collaboration, mutual support, and shared success.

  • Build with Heart and Balance: We balance passion and urgency with long-term sustainability and quality.

  • Don't @!#% the Customer: Customer trust and satisfaction remain at the core of every decision.

  • Be the Change You Seek: We empower everyone to take initiative and drive continuous improvement.

• Social Impact (Atlassian Foundation): Through the Pledge 1% model, Atlassian contributes 1% of equity, profit, employee time, and product to social impact initiatives. All permanent employees receive 5 days of paid volunteering leave each year.

• Belonging & Diversity: We are dedicated to creating an equitable, inclusive workplace where diverse perspectives are celebrated and every team member feels empowered to do the best work of their lives.

Responsibilities:

Principal Software Engineer

About the Role

We are seeking an exceptional Principal Software Engineer to lead the technical strategy, architecture, and engineering execution distributed systems. In this role, you will act as a primary technical authority—driving long-term architectural vision, tackling complex scalability challenges, and raising the engineering bar across multiple teams.

You will partner closely with engineering leadership, product management, design, and data teams to deliver resilient, high-performance platforms and services that power seamless customer and partner experiences at scale.

What You’ll Do

• Drive Technical Vision & Architecture: Define the technical direction, system design, and multi-year roadmaps for core platforms, distributed services, and high-throughput data pipelines.

• Solve High-Complexity Engineering Challenges: Lead the design and implementation of highly available, low-latency, and fault-tolerant architectures across multi-region cloud environments.

• Set the Quality & Reliability Standard: Establish best practices for operational excellence, observability, automated testing, SLO/SLA attainment, and performance optimization.

• Lead High-Impact Technical Initiatives: Spearhead platform modernizations, cloud migrations, infrastructure cost-optimization efforts, and compliance or security standards (including SOX, data governance, and threat modeling).

• Cross-Organizational Alignment: Collaborate across engineering organizations to build consensus on architectural standards, reusable frameworks, and API contracts.

• Mentor & Elevate Engineering Talent: Coach senior and staff engineers, foster an inclusive engineering culture, actively participate in architectural review boards, and influence hiring standards.

What We’re Looking For

• Demonstrated Technical Leadership: Extensive experience architecting, operating, and scaling enterprise-grade, distributed SaaS platforms at high volume.

• Deep Systems Expertise: Mastery of backend technologies (e.g., Java, Scala, Go, or Python), distributed datastores (relational, document, and caching layers), and message brokers/event streaming architectures (e.g., Kafka).

• Cloud Architecture & Infrastructure: Deep hands-on experience with modern cloud providers (AWS/GCP), container orchestration (Kubernetes), infrastructure as code (Terraform), and microservices architectures.

• Reliability & Performance Focus: Proven track record of improving system uptime, reducing latency, instituting SLO-driven reliability frameworks, and driving root-cause analysis for complex outages.

• Strategic Influence: Exceptional written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to distill intricate technical trade-offs for executive stakeholders and guide cross-functional teams toward pragmatic technical solutions.

• Pragmatic Problem Solver: Strong balance of visionary long-term architecture with disciplined, iterative execution and delivery.

Key Competencies

• Architecture & System Design: Distributed consensus, multi-tenant isolation, caching strategies, and event-driven systems.

• Operational Excellence: Chaos engineering, observability (tracing, metrics, logging), and automated incident mitigation.

• Technical Strategy & Execution: Ability to break down ambiguous, company-wide technical problems into clear, phased engineering initiatives.

Qualifications:

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.

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.

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.