Principal Machine Learning Systems Engineer, Search Engineering

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.

Search Platform powers the search functionality in Atlassian products. The team delivers low-latency, highly relevant, and reliable search experiences for all Atlassian users across all surfaces by supporting scalable runtime systems, query orchestration, and robust serving infrastructure. It ensures fast, accurate results for every query.

As Atlassian's client base and content volume grow, search becomes an increasingly challenging engineering domain.

As a Principal Machine Learning Systems Engineer, you'll be at the intersection of search, machine learning and experimentation. You will work directly with cross-functional teams to deliver innovative, ML-powered solutions that directly impact millions of customers.

This job requires strong software engineering skills: 70% engineering and 30% machine learning. In this role, you'll get the chance to:

• Regularly tackle the largest and most complex problems on the team, from technical design to launch

• Determine plans-of-attack on large projects

• Solve complex architecture challenges and apply architectural standards

• Develop and deploy ranking models to optimize ranking to improve the user experience and achieve business objectives

• Develop robust feature engineering practices to ingest, process, and serve features for offline training and online inference at scale.

• Architect and optimize data infrastructure for ingesting, processing, and serving large-scale, high-velocity search and experimentation data.

• Oversee the end-to-end deployment of ML solutions into production, ensuring continuous evaluation, monitoring, and improvement.

• Transfer your depth of knowledge from your current language to excel as a Software Engineer

• Lead code reviews & documentation and take on complex bug fixes, especially on high-risk problems

• Partner across engineering teams to take on company-wide programmes in multiple projects

• Mentor and guide junior engineers, fostering a culture of innovation, collaboration, and continuous learning.

• Communicate complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders, creating concise artifacts for peers, partners, and leadership.

On the first day we will expect you to have

• 10+ years experience in multiple hands-on software/technology leadership roles, with end-to-end responsibility through the software development lifecycle

• Experience with ML workflows and observability at scale.

• Proven track record of tech-leading AI/ML products from conception to launch.

• Bachelor/Master/PHD with a preference for Computer Science degree

• Expertise with one or more prominent languages such as Java, Python, Kotlin, Go, or TypeScript is required.

• Understanding of SaaS, PaaS, IaaS industry with hands-on experience with public cloud offerings (e.g., AWS, GCP, or Azure)

• Knowledge to evaluate trade-offs between correctness, robustness, performance, space and time

• Practice in mentoring other engineers and influencing decision makers throughout the organisation

• Consider the customer impact when making technical decisions

If you've got these skills, even better

• Experience in OpenSearch, Elasticsearch, or other search engine technologies

• Experience in Developer Experience or Developer Productivity

• Experience in Online and Offline experimentation

• Proficiency in Java, Python

• Experience in CI (Continuous Integration) and CD (Continuous Deployment)

• 2+ years of experience running search systems at scale.

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

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