Senior Principal Software Engineer

Atlassian•Seattle, WA

5d•$202,437 - $318,425•Hybrid

About The Position

Atlassian's Trusted Data Platform (TDP) and Data Exchange Platform (DXP) provide the secure, reliable, and scalable data-storage, streaming, processing, and movement capabilities used by Atlassian product and platform teams. Together, these platforms help teams manage and move critical customer data while meeting complex enterprise requirements, including data residency, encryption, regulatory compliance, reliability, disaster recovery, and operation across multiple cloud environments. We are looking for a Senior Principal Engineer to provide organization-wide technical leadership across TDP and DXP. This role will shape the architecture and evolution of our cloud-agnostic data infrastructure, including the compute and runtime foundations used by TDP and DXP services, the streaming substrate that powers real-time data movement, and the intelligence capabilities that help teams understand platform reliability, cost, adoption, and operational health. 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, infrastructure 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 multi-cloud, reliability, and customer requirements into architectures and execution plans that teams can successfully deliver.

Requirements

Significant experience as a senior technical leader for large-scale distributed systems, data platforms, streaming infrastructure, cloud platforms, or comparable business-critical systems.
Demonstrated success setting technical direction and delivering multi-team or multi-organization platform initiatives.
Deep expertise in distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, reliability engineering, and production operations.
Experience designing or operating large-scale streaming, messaging, data-processing, storage, or analytical systems.
Strong understanding of Kubernetes or comparable compute platforms, including workload isolation, autoscaling, deployment safety, observability, and resilience.
Experience designing systems for multiple cloud providers, regions, failure domains, or specialized operating environments.
Experience delivering enterprise capabilities such as data residency, encryption, compliance, disaster recovery, tenant isolation, or regulated-cloud support.
Proven ability to convert ambiguous business 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 engineers and raising the technical and architectural capabilities of an engineering organization.

Nice To Haves

Experience with Kafka or comparable event-streaming technologies, Kubernetes, stream-processing systems such as Flink, distributed databases (TiDB is a plus), analytical data platforms, data lakehouse technologies, multi-cloud migrations, or internal developer platforms is beneficial but not required.

Responsibilities

Serve as a senior technical leader across TDP and DXP, defining architectural direction for initiatives that span multiple teams, services, and organizations.
Establish a clear technical vision, scope, and set of architectural principles for the areas you lead.
Lead architecture reviews and resolve consequential design decisions involving reliability, scalability, security, cost, portability, and platform consistency.
Provide technical leadership from early strategy and problem definition through implementation, production readiness, and long-term operation.
Create clarity where ownership, system boundaries, or decision rights are ambiguous.
Mentor principal and senior engineers, delegate meaningful technical leadership, and grow the organization’s ability to solve complex platform problems.
Define and influence multi-year technical strategy for TDP and DXP in alignment with Atlassian’s broader data-platform and cloud-infrastructure goals.
Translate ambiguous platform, customer, and enterprise requirements into target architectures, technical roadmaps, milestones, and measurable outcomes.
Lead large, cross-team programs involving data infrastructure, streaming, cloud portability, platform intelligence, and developer-facing capabilities.
Identify architectural risks, cross-team dependencies, capacity constraints, and critical sequencing decisions early.
Establish clear technical contracts between data platforms, compute infrastructure, control planes, and customer-facing services.
Coordinate technical direction and execution across engineering teams in the United States, Australia, and India.
Shape how TDP and DXP services run across multiple cloud providers, regions, cells, and specialized operating environments.
Define reusable compute and runtime patterns for distributed data services, streaming platforms, control planes, and background workloads.
Establish standards for workload isolation, resource management, autoscaling, failure domains, deployment safety, observability, and operational readiness.
Partner with central compute and infrastructure teams while remaining accountable for how TDP and DXP use those platforms.
Guide architectures for cloud portability, regional deployment, migration, failover, and recovery.
Ensure platform designs support enterprise requirements such as data residency, tenant isolation, regulated environments, and special-cloud operation.
Guide the evolution of Atlassian’s cloud-agnostic streaming substrate and the platform capabilities built on top of it.
Establish scalable patterns for event streaming, change-data capture, replication, asynchronous processing, and high-volume data movement.
Define technical and operational contracts for provisioning, security, tenancy, scaling, observability, and reliability of streaming infrastructure.
Drive the creation and adoption of reusable libraries, frameworks, and paved roads that reduce duplicated solutions across teams.
Partner with storage, analytics, product, and platform teams to ensure streaming capabilities meet end-to-end requirements for latency, ordering, data integrity, and recovery.
Help teams select the appropriate streaming or data-movement abstraction while protecting the organization from unnecessary infrastructure complexity.
Shape the architecture and technical direction for TDP Insights, the intelligence layer across TDP, DXP, and related data infrastructure.
Enable decision-quality visibility into data volume, growth, movement, residency, reliability, recovery readiness, cost, and platform adoption.
Guide the design of scalable telemetry ingestion, stream processing, analytical storage, and query capabilities.
Establish common definitions and technical standards so operational, customer, and cost insights can be trusted across teams.
Partner with service owners to turn platform insights into improvements in reliability, capacity, efficiency, security, and developer experience.
Ensure the architecture supports data locality, cloud portability, high-cardinality workloads, and sustainable operating economics.
Establish engineering standards for availability, durability, performance, data integrity, security, compliance, and recoverability.
Define the technical quality bar for production readiness, including service-level objectives, observability, capacity planning, failure testing, and operational documentation.
Act as a senior technical escalation point for material incidents and systemic platform risks.
Lead or support complex incident response and ensure that lessons result in durable architectural and operational improvements.
Identify risks that span organizational boundaries and drive them to resolution through clear owners, decisions, and technical plans.
Ensure designs account for disaster recovery, backup and restore, regional failure, migration safety, and reversibility.
Build trusted partnerships across product, engineering, security, compliance, reliability, infrastructure, FinOps, and customer-facing teams.
Influence Directors, engineering managers, principal engineers, and senior stakeholders without relying on reporting authority.
Represent TDP and DXP architecture in engineering reviews, leadership forums, operational reviews, and company-level technical discussions.
Resolve cross-organizational technical dependencies where teams have different priorities, constraints, or success measures.
Ensure architectural decisions account for infrastructure efficiency, demand growth, operational burden, and unit economics.
Make and influence investment decisions that prioritize customer trust, strategic platform value, and sustainable cost efficiency.
Raise the quality of technical proposals, architecture documents, implementation plans, production-readiness reviews, and operational practices.
Remain sufficiently hands-on to validate important architectural assumptions, develop reference implementations, and unblock critical technical work.
Promote reuse, shared standards, and well-supported platform capabilities over bespoke team-level solutions.
Create forums and mechanisms that improve technical decision-making across distributed teams.
Mentor senior engineers toward broader technical leadership and principal-level impact.
Contribute to hiring, technical assessment, engineering calibration, and the development of the broader engineering community.