Senior Principal Machine Learning Engineer

Atlassian•Seattle, WA

4h•$222,300 - $348,975•Remote

About The Position

Atlassian is seeking a Senior Principal Machine Learning Engineer to join our GenAI Platform organization, focusing on the quality and reliability of Rovo Chat . Rovo is Atlassian’s AI teammate, embedded across our products to help teams search, understand, and act on their work. In this role, you will be the technical driver behind making Rovo Chat exceptionally accurate, trustworthy, observable, and reliable at scale . You will define what “great” looks like for GenAI chat quality, build the platforms and evaluation systems to measure it, and lead cross‑org efforts that materially improve customer outcomes and reduce incidents. This work sits at the intersection of LLMs, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), evaluation and quality frameworks, observability, and large‑scale production systems .

Requirements

10+ years of industry experience in machine learning / applied AI , including shipping production systems at scale.
Deep hands‑on expertise with LLMs and/or large‑scale NLP systems , including at least one of: Retrieval‑augmented generation (RAG), Search & ranking / relevance, Conversational AI / assistants / agents, Evaluation and quality frameworks for LLM applications.
Strong coding skills in Python (and/or Java) with the ability to write performant, production‑quality code , plus: Solid experience with Java/Kotlin and large‑scale data processing (e.g., Spark), Familiarity with cloud environments (e.g., AWS, Databricks) and modern ML tooling.
Demonstrated experience designing and operating ML systems end‑to-end , including: Data pipelines and feature generation, Training, evaluation, and deployment, Monitoring, incident response, and iterative improvement.
A track record of technical leadership beyond a single team , such as: Driving cross‑team/platform initiatives, Making high‑impact architecture decisions, Influencing roadmaps and org‑level priorities.
Ability to communicate complex ML concepts clearly to engineers, PMs, designers, and leadership, and to tell a compelling story with data .
A strong product sense and bias for pragmatism and iteration (80/20 mindset: knowing when “good and measurable now” beats “perfect later”).

Nice To Haves

Master’s degree or PhD in Computer Science, Machine Learning, Statistics, or a related technical field .
Experience with: LLM fine‑tuning, post‑training, and optimization (instruction tuning, preference optimization, safety tuning), Model evaluation and guardrails (LLM‑as‑a‑judge, red‑teaming, safety frameworks), High‑reliability systems in SaaS (SLOs, error budgets, incident command, post‑incident analysis).
Prior work on AI assistants or conversational experiences in a B2B SaaS or productivity setting.
Experience partnering with SRE / incident management / support to reduce MTTR, improve root‑cause coverage, and lower ticket volume through better tooling and automation.
Experience building observability and debuggability tools for ML or GenAI systems (e.g., tracing, experiment management, evaluation platforms).

Responsibilities

Set the bar for Rovo Chat quality & reliability
Build the evaluation & observability stack for GenAI chat
Lead technical strategy for GenAI platform quality
Deliver high‑impact improvements to customer outcomes
Mentor, influence, and grow the AI community

Benefits

Atlassians have flexibility in where they work – whether in an office, from home, or a combination of the two.
We can hire people in any country where we have a legal entity.
Interviews and onboarding are conducted virtually, a part of being a distributed-first company.
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.

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