Technical Head of Enginering

Atlassian; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 244,000 - 318,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health benefits

Volunteer days

Perks & benefits info

Job summary

Atlassian in San Francisco offers flexible work options, including office, remote, or hybrid, and the chance to shape the Agent Platform through ML and scalable AI experiences. The Technical Head of Engineering will lead a team, write production code when needed, and set the technical direction in collaboration with product and platform stakeholders.

You will grow talent, ensure reliability and security, and translate AI strategy into practical platform capabilities used across Atlassian

Qualifications

• Must have leadership experience leading engineering teams.
• Strong background in ML systems, evaluation, and production readiness.
• Hands-on capability to write production code when needed.

Responsibilities

• Set technical and execution direction with product, ML, data, and platform stakeholders.
• Lead, coach, and develop a team of engineers on agent platform capabilities.
• Be technically hands-on and contribute production code.
• Guide decisions across applied ML, agent workflows, context retrieval, evaluation, observability, and production operations.
• Create an operating cadence with goals, planning, prioritization, risk management, and cross-team communication.
• Balance speed with quality, trust, security, privacy, cost efficiency, and operational readiness.
• Partner with leaders across Rovo, Product and platform teams to align roadmaps and dependencies.
• Foster an inclusive, high-accountability culture for engineers to grow.

Skills

Leadership experience

ML systems

Production code

Job description

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.

Role Summary

We are hiring a Technical Head of Engineering to lead work on Atlassian’s Agent Platform. This role blends people-management responsibilities with deep technical leadership across applied ML, agentic systems, platform engineering, and production-quality AI experiences.

The ideal candidate is a technically strong hands-on leader who is comfortable being either an individual contributor or a people manager. They can grow and lead a high-performing team while staying close enough to the technology to guide ML architecture, quality, evaluation, reliability, and platform decisions as well as write production code themselves. They should be comfortable operating at the intersection of product outcomes, developer experience, AI/ML systems, and scalable platform foundations.

About The Agent Platform Team

The Agent Platform team builds foundational capabilities that make AI agents useful, reliable, secure, and scalable across Atlassian. The team operates in a high-impact area connected to Rovo, Teamwork Graph, Jira agent workflows, and other Atlassian products. Its work helps Atlassian teams and customers create agentic experiences that can reason over work context, orchestrate across tools, and deliver meaningful outcomes in real product workflows. They also insure security of agentic products and help build evaluation systems.

This is a strong fit for a leader who is excited by platform leverage: building reusable systems, patterns, and capabilities that help many product teams move faster while maintaining quality, trust, and operational excellence.

Why This Role Exists

• Atlassian is investing heavily in AI-native and agentic experiences, and the platform layer is critical to making those experiences production-ready.
• The team needs a leader who can provide clear direction, build talent, and create an execution rhythm across ambiguous, fast-moving AI platform work.
• The role requires ML and systems depth to build alongside senior engineers and discuss architecture, evaluation, quality, reliability, and tradeoffs—not just people management.
• The leader will help translate broad AI strategy into practical platform capabilities that can be adopted across Atlassian products.

Key Responsibilities

• Set technical and execution direction in partnership with product, engineering, ML, data, and platform stakeholders.
• Lead, coach, and develop a team of engineers working on agent platform capabilities, including hiring, performance management, career development, and team health.
• Be technically hands-on and write production code.
• Guide technical decisions across applied ML systems, agent workflows, context retrieval, evaluation, quality measurement, observability, and production operations.
• Create a strong operating cadence: goals, planning, prioritization, risk management, decision-making, and cross-team communication.
• Ensure the team balances speed with quality, trust, security, privacy, cost efficiency, and operational readiness.
• Partner with leaders across Rovo, Product and platform teams across Atlassian to align roadmaps and dependencies.
• Build an inclusive, high-accountability team culture where engineers can do their best work and grow their craft.

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: $243,900 - $318,425
• Zone B: $219,510 - $286,583
• Zone C: $202,437 - $264,293

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.