Principal Software Engineer, Design System - Design Language

We're looking for a Principal Software Engineer to join the Atlassian Design System (ADS), part of the Dev Infra organisation.
ADS is what enables all Atlassian teams to quickly build familiar experiences across apps that customers love. You'll be part of the Design Language team that builds the foundations that make our apps feel cohesive, expressive, accessible and performant across the entire Atlassian System of Work - colour, typography, spacing, elevation, iconography, shape, motion, and key building blocks such as labelling.
You will be at the centre of our journey to transform and accelerate how we ship our evolving design language at huge scale in an AI-enabled software development lifecycle. Our React component library of 100+ packages, design tokens, theming infrastructure, guidelines and patterns, the atlassian.design website and context for AI agents, and a suite of tooling and workflows for engineers and designers alike are all part of the team's responsibilities.
Join us in directly shaping how thousands of Atlassians, alongside AI agents and Marketplace partners, craft experiences used by millions of users!
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.
This high-impact role for an experienced technical leader gives you the opportunity to drive major initiatives that influence multiple apps, partner teams, and workflows right across Atlassian.
You'll lead the technical direction and steer the engineering team across design language initiatives, such as our new motion system and enterprise-scale theming and branding including as part of generative UI. You'll also help us shape industry-leading efforts in measuring and ensuring visual coherence in work by both humans and AI agents.
This is an exciting opportunity to collaborate with world-class engineers, designers, and product leaders across the company, to ensure our apps feel designed by one hand, and are built consistently in code written by both humans and AI agents.
In this role, you'll:

• Innovate and lead technically: Evolve visual and interaction coherence across Atlassian by leading the technical vision and architecture for the future of Atlassian's design language, from inception to build to rollout. Steer the team to plan projects and de-risk delivery. Be a champion for ADS and standards across the company.
• Drive quality and scale: Deliver robust, high-quality solutions on top of which all Atlassian apps are built. Be the decision maker balancing design intent with technical feasibility, and considering accessibility, performance, scalability and maintainability.
• Collaborate cross-functionally: Partner closely with product designers, design technologists, product leaders, and teams across the company to champion our design language, and lead staged rollouts Atlassian-wide to land impact directly into the hands of customers.
• Improve productivity and velocity: We're focused on how to make adoption of design language improvements faster and safer. You'll help the team identify and implement the best ways to reduce technical and design debt, drive deduplication and clean up efforts, and introduce tooling, migration patterns, AI workflows and automation that reduce friction and improve the developer experience.
• Mentor and grow the team: Be a "force multiplier" in mentoring and growing senior engineers, raising the bar for our engineering culture. You'll be a role model who coaches, pairs, reviews, and provides hands-on technical guidance and feedback.

At Atlassian, we strive to design equitable, explainable, and competitive compensation programs. We follow consistent hiring practices and account for each candidate's skills, knowledge, and experience when setting base pay within the range.
This role may also be eligible for benefits, bonuses, commissions, and equity.
A strong interest in design systems is important, though you don't need specific prior experience. Familiarity with design fundamentals (e.g. motion design, colour systems) would be a bonus.
We're seeking candidates with:

• Systems thinking and experience architecting and maintaining large-scale platforms
• Proven cross-functional collaboration with designers and product leaders
• Deep expertise in fundamental JavaScript, HTML and CSS
• Extensive experience with modern frontend technologies and release processes (e.g. React, TypeScript, bundling, linting, feature gating, incident management)
• Proven experience leading complex projects and programs of work
• A track record of contributing to high-performing engineering culture - through mentoring, setting standards, recruiting, community building, or similar

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.