Principal Software Engineer Search Platform

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.

Jira Platform Search

The Jira Platform Search organization powers the foundational search backend for the entire Jira product suite, serving billions of requests daily across a massive multi-tenant architecture. The platform is currently undergoing a multi-year architectural transformation to support unprecedented customer scale and evolving usage patterns—ensuring industry-leading performance, elasticity, and high-availability reliability at scale.

Jira Platform Search Team

As a Principal Software Engineer for the Jira Platform Search team , you will architect and lead high-scale search solutions across engineering teams to drive our next-generation platform transformation: decomposing core monolith services into modern, resilient microservices capable of handling billions of daily requests.

Partnering closely with Engineering Managers, Product Managers, and Architects, you will steer multi-quarter architectural roadmaps, champion operational excellence, and deliver Tier-0 reliability across our global multi-tenant cloud infrastructure.

Responsibilities

- End-to-End Technical Delivery: Drive solutions for high-complexity problems from architectural design through to successful production launch.
- Strategic Execution: Define technical roadmaps, scoping, and execution strategies for large-scale engineering initiatives.
- Architectural Excellence: Resolve complex systems design challenges while establishing and driving the adoption of scalable architectural standards across new projects.
- Engineering Quality & Resilience: Lead high-impact code reviews, technical documentation, and the diagnosis and resolution of critical, high-risk system defects.
- Review Standards & Best Practices: Set the benchmark for rigorous, constructive, and impactful code review practices across the team.
- Cross-Functional Alignment: Partner with cross-organizational engineering teams to execute strategic, company-wide programs across multiple workstreams.
- Domain & Technical Adaptability: Leverage deep domain and programming expertise to quickly master new technology stacks and drive high-performance engineering outcomes.
- Talent Development: Mentor and develop emerging engineering talent, elevating technical rigor and supporting overall team growth.

Qualifications

- 10+ years in hands-on software/technology architect roles, owning end-to-end SDLC. Bachelor's degree preferred, ideally in Computer Science
- Deep production expertise in OpenSearch or Elasticsearch and a strong understanding of Lucene indexing and query-execution internals.
- Experience designing tenant isolation, data partitioning, shard placement, routing, and capacity strategies for distributed search systems.
- Proven improvements to search latency, indexing throughput, availability, and infrastructure efficiency, supported by measurable outcomes on Opensearch or similar search engines
- Expertise in reliable ingestion, index freshness, data correctness, permission-aware search, and online reindexing.
- Experience with Lucene, Solr, or other Search technologies.
- Strong technical depth in distributed architectures, cloud-native services, and asynchronous/event-driven systems (e.g., Postgresql, Kafka, OpenSearch/ElasticSearch, DynamoDB/relational data stores, search engines).
- Proven track record architecting, operating, and scaling high-throughput distributed systems and cloud services (e.g., AWS, GCP).

Preferred Qualifications:

- Hands-on familiarity with Java, Kotlin, or Kubernetes ecosystem.

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.

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

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.

Related content