Senior Principal Software Engineer

Engineering | Seattle, United States | Remote, Remote | Full-Time
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.
To help our teams work together effectively, this role requires you to be located in the United States. You will work closely with engineering teams and technical leaders across the United States, Australia, and India.
About the Team
Atlassian's Dev AI engineering organization is pioneering the next generation of AI-native developer experiences and autonomous software development lifecycle (SDLC) capabilities. We build the intelligent platforms, agent runtimes, and developer tooling that empower engineering teams worldwide-transforming how software is planned, written, reviewed, tested, and shipped across Jira, Bitbucket, and the Atlassian Teamwork Graph.
We are looking for a Senior Principal Engineer to provide organization-wide technical leadership across our Dev AI platforms and agentic developer initiatives. This role will shape the multi-year architecture and technical evolution of our autonomous developer agents, runtime sandboxes, agent orchestration engines, and context-retrieval infrastructure.
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, platform 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 AI capabilities, distributed system requirements, and developer needs into architectures and execution plans that teams can successfully deliver.
Technical Leadership & Architectural Strategy

• Serve as the senior technical authority across Dev AI, defining multi-year architectural blueprints, principles, and roadmaps aligned with Atlassian's broader AI and platform strategy.
• Drive consequential architectural decisions across complex distributed systems, balancing reliability, scalability, security, latency, and inference economics.
• Resolve architectural ambiguity across organizational boundaries, establishing clear ownership, system interfaces, and technical contracts.

Agentic Architecture & SDLC Foundations

• Architect scalable, secure runtimes for autonomous developer agents, including execution sandboxes, tool orchestration, task decomposition, and memory systems.
• Guide code-intelligence capabilities-including code synthesis, automated review, and semantic search-grounded in repository context and the Atlassian Teamwork Graph.
• Establish shared libraries, frameworks, and paved roads that eliminate duplicate effort and standardize agent patterns across teams.

Trust, Reliability & Operational Excellence

• Establish production-readiness bars and engineering standards for availability, customer data isolation, latency, and responsible AI governance.
• Shape technical direction for automated agent evaluation, benchmark frameworks, and telemetry to continuously assess accuracy, cost, and developer adoption.
• Act as a senior escalation point for systemic platform risks and major incidents, driving durable architectural remediations.

Cross-Functional Influence & Engineering Craft

• Partner with engineering directors, product managers, and architects across the CTO organization to align platform roadmaps and resolve critical dependencies without reporting authority.
• Mentor and sponsor senior and principal engineers, elevating the technical caliber and decision-making rigor across distributed teams.
• Remain hands-on with strategic prototypes, architectural validation, and technical hiring calibration across the broader engineering community.

Compensation
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.
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