Senior Principal Software Engineer

Atlassian; Seattle (WA); Hybrid; USD 244,000 - 318,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health and wellbeing resources

Volunteer days

Job summary

Atlassian in Seattle seeks a Senior Principal Engineer to shape the architecture of our Dev AI platforms and autonomous developer initiatives. You will define multi-year technical direction, drive cross-team roadmaps, and deliver reusable platform capabilities across Jira, Bitbucket, and the Atlassian Teamwork Graph.

You will mentor senior engineers, lead complex architectural decisions, and partner with product, security, and platform teams to raise the engineering quality bar while delivering

Qualifications

• Significant experience leading large-scale distributed systems and developer platforms.
• Proven ability to translate vague business needs into architectural roadmaps.
• Strong communication skills for engineers, executives, and partners.
• Experience with secure code execution environments and CI/CD pipelines.
• Ability to mentor engineers and drive cross-team collaboration.
• Track record of creating reusable technical capabilities.

Responsibilities

• Define multi-year architectural blueprints and roadmaps for Dev AI platforms.
• Drive architectural decisions balancing reliability, scalability, security, and cost.
• Architect runtimes for autonomous developer agents and sandboxes.
• Guide code-intelligence capabilities grounded in repository context.
• Establish shared libraries and standard patterns across teams.
• Lead incident response and durable platform improvements.
• Mentor engineers and align cross-functional roadmaps.

Skills

Senior technical leadership

Distributed systems

Architectural strategy

Communication skills

Incident response

Tools

microVMs

gVisor

WebAssembly

Vector databases

RAG

Graph databases

Developer platform APIs

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.

To help our teams work together effectively, this role requires you to be located in the United States. You will work closely with engineering teams and technical leaders across the United States, Australia, and India.

About the Team

Atlassian’s Dev AI engineering organization is pioneering the next generation of AI-native developer experiences and autonomous software development lifecycle (SDLC) capabilities. We build the intelligent platforms, agent runtimes, and developer tooling that empower engineering teams worldwide—transforming how software is planned, written, reviewed, tested, and shipped across Jira, Bitbucket, and the Atlassian Teamwork Graph.

We are looking for a Senior Principal Engineer to provide organization-wide technical leadership across our Dev AI platforms and agentic developer initiatives. This role will shape the multi-year architecture and technical evolution of our autonomous developer agents, runtime sandboxes, agent orchestration engines, and context-retrieval infrastructure.

This is a high-leverage individual-contributor role. You will establish technical direction, lead complex cross-organizational initiatives, resolve architectural ambiguity, and raise the engineering quality bar across multiple teams. You will partner with engineering managers, principal engineers, product and program leaders, platform teams, security specialists, and Atlassian product organizations.

Success in this role means creating a coherent technical direction across teams, delivering reusable platform capabilities rather than isolated solutions, and turning complex AI capabilities, distributed system requirements, and developer needs into architectures and execution plans that teams can successfully deliver.

Responsibilities

Technical Leadership & Architectural Strategy

• Serve as the senior technical authority across Dev AI, defining multi-year architectural blueprints, principles, and roadmaps aligned with Atlassian’s broader AI and platform strategy.

• Drive consequential architectural decisions across complex distributed systems, balancing reliability, scalability, security, latency, and inference economics.

• Resolve architectural ambiguity across organizational boundaries, establishing clear ownership, system interfaces, and technical contracts.

Agentic Architecture & SDLC Foundations

• Architect scalable, secure runtimes for autonomous developer agents, including execution sandboxes, tool orchestration, task decomposition, and memory systems.

• Guide code-intelligence capabilities—including code synthesis, automated review, and semantic search—grounded in repository context and the Atlassian Teamwork Graph.

• Establish shared libraries, frameworks, and paved roads that eliminate duplicate effort and standardize agent patterns across teams.

Trust, Reliability & Operational Excellence

• Establish production-readiness bars and engineering standards for availability, customer data isolation, latency, and responsible AI governance.

• Shape technical direction for automated agent evaluation, benchmark frameworks, and telemetry to continuously assess accuracy, cost, and developer adoption.

• Act as a senior escalation point for systemic platform risks and major incidents, driving durable architectural remediations.

Cross-Functional Influence & Engineering Craft

• Partner with engineering directors, product managers, and architects across the CTO organization to align platform roadmaps and resolve critical dependencies without reporting authority.

• Mentor and sponsor senior and principal engineers, elevating the technical caliber and decision-making rigor across distributed teams.

• Remain hands-on with strategic prototypes, architectural validation, and technical hiring calibration across the broader engineering community.

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.

Geographic Pay Ranges (Pulls compensation from Workday)

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: $243,900 - $318,425

• Zone B: $219,510 - $286,583

• Zone C: $202,437 - $264,293

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: $243,900 - $318,425

Zone B: $219,510 - $286,583

Zone C: $202,437 - $264,293

Qualifications

• Significant experience as a senior technical leader for large-scale distributed systems, developer platforms, AI/ML systems, cloud infrastructure, or comparable business-critical platforms.

• Demonstrated success setting technical direction and delivering multi-team or multi-organization platform initiatives.

• Deep expertise in distributed systems architecture, cloud infrastructure, reliability engineering, and production operations.

• Practical experience designing, building, or operating production‑grade AI systems, LLM orchestration frameworks, autonomous agent runtimes, or modern developer tooling.

• Strong understanding of cloud‑native compute platforms, containerized environments, secure execution sandboxes, workload isolation, autoscaling, observability, and resilience.

• Proven ability to convert ambiguous business, product, and customer needs into clear architectural direction, roadmaps, and executable technical plans.

• Experience leading complex incident response and turning operational learning into lasting platform improvements.

• Proven ability to influence senior engineers, engineering managers, Directors, and cross‑functional stakeholders without direct authority.

• A track record of creating reusable technical capabilities and driving their adoption across multiple engineering teams.

• Strong written and verbal communication skills appropriate for engineers, executives, product partners, and customer‑facing stakeholders.

• Experience mentoring senior and principal engineers and raising the technical and architectural capabilities of an engineering organization.

• Experience with secure code execution environments (e.g., microVMs, gVisor, WebAssembly), vector databases, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), graph data systems, automated evaluation frameworks, or developer platform APIs is beneficial but not required.

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.