Principal Machine Learning Systems Engineer

Overview

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.

Your future team

This role is on Atlassian's Agentic Retrieval team, which is responsible for powering all of the search and retrieval behind Rovo Search, Chat and Agent, and Atlassian's AI products. Think of it as the engine that finds and delivers the right information across an enterprise's entire knowledge base — Confluence, Jira, Trello, and beyond.

Responsibilities

We’re looking for a Principal Machine Learning Systems Engineer to architect and scale the AI agents facing platform. The team is evolving from a vector/semantic search platform into a full hybrid search capability and, ultimately, into Atlassian’s agentic retrieval layer — a system that dynamically generates query plans on the fly using graph-based orchestration rather than static, linear pipelines. You’ll own the technical direction of this evolution, ensuring high-quality results, low latency, high reliability, and cost efficiency as it serves both human users and AI agents at enterprise scale.

Qualifications

On your first day, we’ll expect you to have

• 7+ years of experience as a software developer.

• Deep experience building and operating production search, ads, or recommendation systems at scale — years of hands-on work with real traffic volumes and the associated reliability and latency challenges

• Hands-on experience building GenAI systems — shipping agents, LLM-powered applications, or AI systems at scale (not just theoretical knowledge)

• Expertise in hybrid search — building indexes that combine vector/semantic and full-text/lexical retrieval

It would be great, but not required if you have

• Expert-level with search platform, deep learning training/inference platform.

• Experience with at least one major vector database (pinecone, milvus, qdrant, turbopuffer, etc).

• Experience with scaling and deploying Machine Learning models.

Compensation

At Atlassian, we strive to design equitable, explainable, and competitive compensation programs. To support this goal, the baseline of our range is higher than that of the typical market range, but in turn we expect to hire most candidates near this baseline. Base pay within the range is ultimately determined by a candidate's skills, expertise, or experience.

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: $232,200 - $303,150

Zone B: $209,700 - $273,775

Zone C: $193,500 - $252,625

This role may also be eligible for benefits, bonuses, commissions, and equity.

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.

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.