Principal Machine Learning Engineer

Atlassian; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 237,000 - 309,000; Full time

Job summary

At Atlassian, we seek a Principal Machine Learning Engineer in San Francisco to lead knowledge graph initiatives that power a personal working environment context for Rovo Chat and the Teamwork Graph CLI. You will design graphs, schemas, and APIs, and mentor teams across Knowledge AI and product groups.

Candidates should have 8+ years in ML/AI with graph tech, and a track record shipping end-to-end ML features at production scale.

Qualifications

• 8+ years in ML/AI eng with knowledge graphs or similar.
• Production ML features: data pipeline to deployment.
• Experience with graph databases and query languages.
• Experience shipping end-to-end ML systems at scale.

Responsibilities

• Design and build Personal Work Context Graphs and schemas.
• Improve Rovo Chat with graph context and relevance.
• Deliver low-latency, permission-safe APIs and CLI.
• Provide technical leadership across Knowledge AI and Graph teams.

Skills

Knowledge graphs

Graph neural networks

Entity extraction

Production ML

Graph databases

Cypher/SPARQL

LLM orchestration

RAG

Context injection

Education

Master's or PhD in CS/ML

Tools

Neo4j

Neptune

GraphX

DGL

PyG

Job description

Overview

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.

At Atlassian, we're on a mission to unleash the potential of every team. Central to that mission is the Teamwork Graph (TWG) — Atlassian's real-time, permissions-aware knowledge graph that unifies people, teams, projects, content, and activities across Atlassian and connected third-party tools. We believe the next frontier of AI-powered teamwork is personal working environment context: knowing who you collaborate with, what you're actively working on, and which documents matter right now — so that Rovo Chat, agents, and the TWG CLI can deliver answers that are precise, relevant, and actionable.

We're seeking a Principal Machine Learning Engineer (P60) to lead and design knowledge graph projects that build this personal working environment context layer and serve it at scale through Rovo Chat and the Teamwork Graph CLI.

Responsibilities

What You'll Do

Build Personal Work Context Graphs

• Design graph inference pipelines that surface collaborators, active work, documents, and projects from connected tools.

• Define schemas, permissions, and evaluation frameworks for reliable inferred context.

Improve Rovo Chat with Graph Context

• Integrate personal context into Rovo Chat to improve relevance, groundedness, and efficiency.

• Build and measure context-selection strategies with the Rovo Chat team.

Deliver Context Through Graph APIs & CLI

• Build low-latency, permission-safe APIs and CLI experiences for personal work context.

• Enable MCP-compatible agents to query a user’s work environment in real time.

Lead Across Teams

• Provide technical leadership across Knowledge AI, Teamwork Graph, and product teams.

• Mentor engineers and champion responsible, privacy-safe AI and data quality.

Compensation

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.

Please visit go.atlassian.com/payzones for more information on which locations are included in each of our geographic pay zones. However, please confirm the zone for your specific location with your recruiter.

This role may also be eligible for benefits, bonuses, commissions, and equity.

Pay Ranges

In The United States, we have three geographic pay zones. For this role, our current base pay ranges for new hires in each zone are:

Zone A: $236,700 - $309,025

Zone B: $213,030 - $278,123

Zone C: $196,461 - $256,491

Qualifications

What We're Looking For

Experience

• 8+ years in ML/AI engineering, with deep expertise in knowledge graphs, graph neural networks, or entity/relationship extraction.

• Proven track record of building and shipping ML-powered graph inference or knowledge representation systems at production scale.

• Hands‑on experience with one or more of: graph databases (Neo4j, Neptune, or equivalent), graph query languages (Cypher, SPARQL), or large‑scale graph processing frameworks (GraphX, DGL, PyG).

• Demonstrated ability to ship end‑to‑end ML features — from data pipeline and model training through serving, monitoring, and iteration.

Skills

• Strong understanding of LLM orchestration, retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG), and context injection — specifically how graph‑derived context improves LLM grounding and relevance.

• Experience designing inference pipelines that derive implicit entities and relationships from heterogeneous activity signals (work items, documents, projects, code changes).

• Proficiency in evaluation methodology: offline precision/recall benchmarks, online A/B testing, and human evaluation for ML systems.

• Ability to set technical direction across teams, drive architecture decisions, and communicate tradeoffs clearly to engineering and product leadership.

Education

• Master's or PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Information Retrieval, or related field preferred — or equivalent industry experience.

Nice to Have

• Experience with enterprise knowledge graphs, semantic embeddings, or ontology design at scale.

• Familiarity with permission‑aware data systems and privacy‑by‑design principles for user‑centric inference.

• Background in collaboration analytics, social network analysis, or user activity modeling.

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.