Technical Lead - ML Systems for Search (Remote-friendly)

Atlassian; San Francisco (CA); Remote; USD 273,000 - 356,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Health and wellbeing resources

Paid volunteer days

Equity

Job summary

Atlassian’s Search Platform team is building next-generation, low-latency search infrastructure powering knowledge discovery across enterprise data. As technical lead for Search Serving, you will shape long-term direction and drive end-to-end quality, reliability, and cost efficiency.

You will collaborate with Relevance, Search Data, and Product, setting ML-enabled strategies and turning cutting-edge research into production systems while mentoring engineers across multiple teams.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of relevant experience, including designing and operating large-scale, low-latency search, recommendation, advertising, or retrieval systems.
• Deep ML systems experience, including production inference, model optimization, retrieval and ranking pipelines, evaluation, experimentation, and operations.
• Strong distributed-systems expertise across performance, concurrency, availability, multi-tenancy, capacity planning, observability, and cost efficiency.
• Strong information-retrieval and applied-ML foundations, with practical experience across lexical, semantic, vector, or hybrid retrieval.
• A track record of setting cross-organization technical direction, resolving consequential architecture choices, and delivering through multiple teams and senior technical leaders.
• Strong product and technical judgment: framing important problems, testing hypotheses, comparing alternatives, and stopping investments whose value does not justify their complexity.

Responsibilities

• Design and build high quality agentic search systems, addressing tail latency, throughput, concurrency, caching, sharding, fault isolation, capacity, and graceful degradation.
• Set the long-term architecture and technical roadmap for online retrieval, index serving, query processing, and ML inference. Turn advances in information retrieval and machine learning into production systems through rigorous evaluation, experimentation, and incremental adoption.
• Establish strong ML production practices spanning offline and online evaluation, experimentation, observability, safe rollout and rollback, model-quality regressions, and incident response.
• Advance production inference for embedding, retrieval, and ranking models through techniques such as batching, quantization, distillation, compilation, and hardware-aware optimization.
• Lead step-change initiatives across multiple teams, simplify fragmented systems, mentor senior engineers, and align technical and product leaders around long-term direction. Uplevel team and platform maturity to best-in-class agentic development practices to accelerate innovation.

Skills

Distributed systems

ML systems

Information retrieval

Cross-organization leadership

Product & technical judgment

Job description

Atlassian’s Search Platform team is building next-generation, low-latency search infrastructure powering knowledge discovery across enterprise data. As technical lead for Search Serving, you will shape long-term direction and drive end-to-end quality, reliability, and cost efficiency.

You will collaborate with Relevance, Search Data, and Product, setting ML-enabled strategies and turning cutting-edge research into production systems while mentoring engineers across multiple teams.