Principal Machine Learning Engineer

Atlassian; Seattle (WA); On-site; USD 237,000 - 309,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Benefits

Job summary

Atlassian seeks a Principal ML Engineer for the Rovo & AI Engineering org to advance Rovo Chat with hands-on ML work and strategic leadership. You will drive model advancement, evaluation, and scalable ML systems, while guiding cross-functional teams toward impactful product outcomes.

You will set technical vision, balance quality with latency and cost, and lead ambitious initiatives across multiple groups to raise the bar for AI-powered experiences across Atlassian.

Qualifications

• Track record architecting and shipping large-scale ML or AI systems with measurable impact.
• Deep experience with LLM-powered products, agentic systems, and dataset development.
• Strong production engineering skills and ability to stay hands-on in a modern ML stack.

Responsibilities

• Tackle open-ended ML problems and drive advances across models, agents, evaluation, and quantity improvements for millions of users.
• Set the technical vision for measuring and improving Rovo Chat quality and reliability.
• Architect and build production ML and evaluation systems at scale with data pipelines, simulations, and online signals.

Skills

LLM-powered systems

Technical leadership

Hands-on ML

Mentorship

Cross-functional collaboration

Production engineering

Job description

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.

As a Principal ML Engineer in the Rovo & AI Engineering org, you will contribute to Atlassian’s biggest bet and fastest area of growth, Rovo Chat. You will bring the latest bleeding edge innovations to the product and build agent harnesses that deliver a step function improvement in quality, reliability and latency.

You will have the opportunity to lead other engineers to drive involved projects from technical design to launch. You will also collaborate with other teams and internal customers to set expectations, gather input and communicate results. Your role is pivotal, stretching beyond these tasks, ensuring AI's transformative potential is realized across our offerings.

What you’ll do

As a Principal Machine Learning Engineer, you’ll tackle the open-ended technical problems that determine whether customers trust Rovo with increasingly complex and consequential work. You’ll remain deeply hands‑on while setting direction across teams: driving advances in models, agents, and evaluation and turning them into measurable improvements for millions of active users.

Set the technical vision for how Atlassian measures and improves Rovo Chat, translating qualities such as helpfulness, correctness, judgment, and reliability into rigorous evaluation strategies.

Architect and build production ML and evaluation systems that operate at scale, including datasets, simulations, automated judges, regression suites, experimentation platforms, and online quality signals.

Advance the state of Rovo’s agentic capabilities across reasoning, planning, tool selection and use, action correctness, retrieval, memory, and long‑horizon execution.

Close the loop between evaluation and product impact: identify systemic failure modes, develop interventions, ship them to production, and establish whether they improved customer outcomes.

Make high‑leverage technical decisions across model choice, prompting, fine‑tuning, data strategy, system architecture, and inference; balancing quality with latency, reliability, safety, and cost.

Lead ambitious, cross‑organizational initiatives with ML, engineering, product, analytics, research, and design partners, creating clarity and momentum where neither the problem nor the solution is well defined.

Establish reusable methods, systems, and quality standards that raise the bar not only for Rovo Chat, but for AI‑powered experiences across Atlassian.

Multiply the impact of other engineers through technical leadership, design reviews, mentorship, and a compelling long‑term vision for how we build and evaluate world‑class AI products.

Your Background

A track record of architecting and shipping large‑scale ML or AI systems that deliver measurable customer and business impact.

Deep experience with LLM‑powered products, agentic systems, model evaluation, experimentation, and dataset development.

Strong production engineering skills and the ability to remain hands‑on in a modern ML stack.

Principal‑level technical leadership: setting direction, influencing across teams, and leading complex initiatives from ambiguity to production.

Excellent product and technical judgment, including balancing quality, speed, reliability, safety, latency, and cost.

The ability to communicate complex ideas clearly and raise the effectiveness of engineers around you through mentorship and technical leadership.

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.

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

On your first day, we’ll expect you to have

7+ years of experience as a software developer

Experience building customer facing Gen AI Applications at scale

Experience pushing the state of the art to achieve breakthrough quality and reliability

Deep understanding of Machine Learning projects lifecycle

Experience leading and supporting senior engineers and working cross functionally

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.

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.