Remote Senior ML Systems Architect – Search at Scale

Atlassian; Austin (TX); Hybrid; USD 273,000 - 356,000; Full time

Job summary

Atlassian is seeking a senior ML/IR leader to drive search-serving architecture across our product surfaces. You will define technical direction for ranking, retrieval, and inference pipelines, and push improvements in quality, latency, and cost at scale.

The role requires 12+ years in engineering with ML systems, deep information retrieval expertise, and strong leadership without formal authority. Collaboration across teams and mentoring engineers is essential.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of engineering experience with ML systems and production ML infrastructure.
• Designing and shipping low-latency ML serving systems at scale (sub-100ms).
• Deep expertise in information retrieval and search.
• Model serving frameworks and hardware optimization.
• Leadership without authority across teams and org boundaries.
• Identify high-leverage research directions and move from prototype to production.
• Experience with online experimentation and rigorous evaluation for ML systems.
• Strong communication to distill complex trade-offs for diverse audiences.

Responsibilities

• Set technical direction for ML-based search serving: ranking models, retrieval architectures, inference pipelines, and serving infrastructure
• Drive measurable improvements across search quality, latency, serving cost, and system reliability through experimentation
• Identify and pursue moonshots delivering step-change improvements
• Lead model optimisation end-to-end: quantisation, distillation, batching, hardware-aware inference
• Define and enforce ML systems standards: evaluation, shadow traffic testing, rollout safety, observability
• Mentor and elevate senior engineers across Search Serving; raise the technical bar
• Partner across teams to align roadmaps and unblock high-impact work
• Translate ambiguous problems into clear technical bets with measurable success criteria

Skills

ML systems

Low-latency ML serving

Information retrieval

Model optimization

Technical leadership

Research to production

Online experimentation

Communication

Tools

Triton

TorchServe

vLLM

Job description

Atlassian is seeking a senior ML/IR leader to drive search-serving architecture across our product surfaces. You will define technical direction for ranking, retrieval, and inference pipelines, and push improvements in quality, latency, and cost at scale.

The role requires 12+ years in engineering with ML systems, deep information retrieval expertise, and strong leadership without formal authority. Collaboration across teams and mentoring engineers is essential.