Senior Principal Machine Learning Systems Engineer, Search Platform

Working at Atlassian

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Search Platforms mission is to power world-class trusted cross-product knowledge search and discovery for people and agents across all of Atlassians surfaces. Agentic search is pushing the boundaries of what is possible with todays search systems and this role is intended to redefine context search and discovery for AI. Youll lead the search and ML architecture that powers search quality latency cost and reliability at scale and set the technical direction for the department.

• Set technical direction for ML-based search serving: ranking models retrieval architectures inference pipelines and serving infrastructure

• Drive measurable improvements across search quality latency serving cost and system reliability through rigorous experimentation and principled engineering

• Identify and pursue moonshots high-ambition calculated bets on search techniques that deliver step-change improvements

• Lead model optimisation end-to-end: quantisation distillation batching strategies hardware-aware inference and latency/accuracy trade-offs

• Define and enforce ML systems standards: model evaluation shadow traffic testing rollout safety and production observability

• Mentor and elevate senior engineers across Search Serving; raise the technical bar through design reviews architecture decisions and hands-on guidance

• Partner across teams - Search Quality ML Platform and product - to align roadmaps and unblock high-impact work

• Translate ambiguous problems into clear technical bets with measurable success criteria

At Atlassian we strive to design equitable explainable and competitive compensation programs. We follow consistent hiring practices and account for each candidates skills knowledge and experience when setting base pay within the range.

Please visit 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.

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

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: $272700 - $356025

Zone B: $245430 - $320423

Zone C: $226341 - $295501

• 12 years of engineering experience with significant depth in ML systems and production ML infrastructure

• Proven track record designing and shipping low-latency ML serving systems at scale (sub-100ms ranking retrieval or inference pipelines)

• Deep expertise in information retrieval and search: dense/sparse retrieval neural reranking hybrid search learning-to-rank

• Strong command of model optimisation techniques and experience with large-scale serving infrastructure: model serving frameworks (Triton TorchServe vLLM or equivalent) GPU/CPU optimisation autoscaling

• Track record of technical leadership without authority - influencing architecture and decisions across team and org boundaries

• Demonstrated ability to identify high-leverage research directions and drive them from prototype to production

• Experience with online experimentation and rigorous evaluation frameworks for ML systems

• Strong communication skills - able to distill complex trade-offs into crisp decisions for technical and non-technical audiences

Bonus: Experience with enterprise search multi-tenant serving compliance-constrained environments (FedRAMP isolated cloud) or cloud-native ML on GCP/AWS.

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 Atlassian

At Atlassian were 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 everyones 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.

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