Senior Principal Engineer - Enterprise Engineering (Backend)
Confirmed on the employer's own hiring board on Nov 3, 2026. First seen by Alion on Nov 1, 2026. Atlassian scores A on the Alion truth index.
We're hiring a Senior Principal Engineer to join Atlassian Team Enterprise, reporting to our Head of Engineering, Enterprise Data Center Products. We serve the world's largest and most demanding organisations. Our mission is to ship software that meets the needs of these enterprise-scale customers, so that they remain our greatest advocates.
In this position you will set the technical direction for the Enterprise Data Center business unit, influencing over 200 engineers. You will own the hardest cross-team technical problems, from strategy and prioritisation through design, architecture and coding.
The world's largest organisations trust Data Center to run their most critical work. You will make sure it stays secure and dependable for every one of them, while building the tools that help them move to Cloud when they are ready. Your work will span long-term security and maintainability, platform modernisation, Marketplace compatibility, migration readiness and AI-driven engineering efficiency.
A great day for you is one where you show our engineers, in practice, how to solve a particularly complex problem with an elegant solution. You will engage them with your research and your experience of tools, stacks, libraries, design patterns and code. Your best days are the ones when complete teams of engineers follow your lead in finding the best solutions, and are motivated to improve what we ship and how we ship it.
Responsibilities
In this role, you will:
Set the long-term technical strategy for Data Center: what we change, and how we keep it secure and supportable for every customer that depends on it.
Lead the use of AI to transform how we build and maintain Data Center, including large-scale automated migrations, upgrades and dependency work.
Own the key cross-team architectural decisions and be accountable for their outcomes.
Bring Data Center and Cloud closer together through shared data, telemetry and platform services, and help customers adopt cloud-native and AI alternatives to their customisations.
Drive the architecture of migration-readiness capabilities (insights, data cleanup, telemetry) that help our largest and most complex customers move to Cloud.
Design a sustainable security and maintenance model, so we can keep shipping fixes to customers quickly and safely.
Shape the platform and API decisions that affect the Marketplace ecosystem, and partner on the tooling that keeps critical apps compatible.
Set the bar for engineering excellence in design, architecture, code and development practices. We are never done.
Mentor and coach engineers and engineering managers, and help them grow their skills in Cloud and AI.
Be a trusted advisor to Heads of Engineering within Team Enterprise and across the company.
Represent Team Enterprise inside Atlassian, and Atlassian externally across the industry.
Qualifications
Qualifications:
15+ years of experience in software engineering, including technical leadership across multiple organisations or 80+ engineers".
Strong technical leadership and significant experience designing, building and shipping enterprise-grade solutions.
Deep, proficiency in Java or another JVM-based language (e.g. Kotlin). Working knowledge of OSGi is a bonus.
Experience designing and building broadly used, scalable platforms and platform components.
A track record of influencing a company's technical direction and educating the broader organisation in your area of expertise.
Passion for software engineering excellence and for providing technical guidance, coaching and mentorship.
Experience recognising, raising and reconciling gaps and redundant efforts across organisations.
The ability to develop clear technical solutions and bring multiple engineering teams and leaders along with you.
A bias for action: you lead by example and influence by doing the technical work.
It's great, but not required, if you have:
A degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
In-depth knowledge of public cloud, particularly running self-managed software on cloud infrastructure (e.g. Kubernetes, AWS, Azure).
Experience with large-scale distributed systems, data and storage technologies, security and reliability, encryption or cryptography.
Experience leading engineers through large, complex projects involving major changes to the technology stack.
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.