Senior Principal Software Engineer

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. Atlassian’s Trusted Data Platform (TDP) and Data Exchange Platform (DXP) provide the secure, reliable, and scalable data-storage, streaming, processing, and movement capabilities used by Atlassian product and platform teams. Together, these platforms help teams manage and move critical customer data while meeting complex enterprise requirements, including data residency, encryption, regulatory compliance, reliability, disaster recovery, and operation across multiple cloud environments. We are looking for a Senior Principal Engineer to provide organization-wide technical leadership across TDP and DXP. This role will shape the architecture and evolution of our cloud-agnostic data infrastructure, including the compute and runtime foundations used by TDP and DXP services, the streaming substrate that powers real-time data movement, and the intelligence capabilities that help teams understand platform reliability, cost, adoption, and operational health. 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, infrastructure 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 multi-cloud, reliability, and customer requirements into architectures and execution plans that teams can successfully deliver. Technical and organizational leadership Serve as a senior technical leader across TDP and DXP, defining architectural direction for initiatives that span multiple teams, services, and organizations. Establish a clear technical vision, scope, and set of architectural principles for the areas you lead. Lead architecture reviews and resolve consequential design decisions involving reliability, scalability, security, cost, portability, and platform consistency. Provide technical leadership from early strategy and problem definition through implementation, production readiness, and long-term operation. Create clarity where ownership, system boundaries, or decision rights are ambiguous. Mentor principal and senior engineers, delegate meaningful technical leadership, and grow the organization’s ability to solve complex platform problems. Strategy and execution Define and influence multi-year technical strategy for TDP and DXP in alignment with Atlassian’s broader data-platform and cloud-infrastructure goals. Translate ambiguous platform, customer, and enterprise requirements into target architectures, technical roadmaps, milestones, and measurable outcomes. Lead large, cross-team programs involving data infrastructure, streaming, cloud portability, platform intelligence, and developer-facing capabilities. Identify architectural risks, cross-team dependencies, capacity constraints, and critical sequencing decisions early. Establish clear technical contracts between data platforms, compute infrastructure, control planes, and customer-facing services. Coordinate technical direction and execution across engineering teams in the United States, Australia, and India. Multi-cloud data and compute architecture Shape how TDP and DXP services run across multiple cloud providers, regions, cells, and