Senior Principal Engineer Core Data Platform

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. Interviews and onboarding are conducted virtually, a part of being a distributed-first company.
Our office is in Bellevue, WA, but we offer flexibility for eligible candidates to work remotely across the West US. Whatever your preference - working from home, an office, or in between - you can choose the place that's best for your work and your lifestyle. We call this TEAM anywhere .
What's the Senior Principal Engineer role? As an engineer well into your career, we know you're an expert at what you do and have a breadth of experience across multiple backend technologies. You take pride in working across departments to deliver transformational solutions that scale an entire company. You enjoy working with other Principals and more junior members look up to and sharing your expertise with others... That's why we're placing a heavy emphasis on leaning on your expertise to take on a high level of responsibility while being a role model and mentor to others on the team.

• Collaborate with partner teams and internal customers to help define technical direction and OKRs for the Core Data platform organization.
• Regularly tackle the largest and most complex problems on the team, from technical design to implementation and launch
• Partner across engineering teams to take on company-wide initiatives spanning multiple projects
• Routinely tackle complex architecture challenges and apply architectural standards and start using them on new projects
• Work across senior engineering and product leaders to build strategy and design solutions to earn customers trust and business
• Own key OKRs and end-to-end outcomes of critical projects in a microservices environment
• Champion best practices and innovative techniques for scalability, reliability, and performance optimizations.
• Own engineering and operational excellence for the health of our systems and processes. Proactively drive opportunities for continuous improvements and own key operational metrics.
• Continually drive developer productivity initiatives to ensure that we unleash the potential of our own teams.
• Help hire and mentor engineers to build an open, innovative and operationally responsible culture.

Basic Requirements

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field.
• 12+ years of experience in backend software development, with a focus on distributed systems and large-scale storage solutions.
• 8+ years of experience designing and managing highly available, large-scale storage architectures in cloud environments.
• 5+ years of hands-on experience working with AWS storage services (S3, EBS, EFS, FSx, Glacier, DynamoDB).
• Proficiency in system design, performance optimization, and cost-efficient architecture for exabyte-scale storage.
• Expertise in at least one major backend programming language (Kotlin, Java, Go, Rust, or Python).
• Experience leading technical strategy and architectural decisions in large, multi-team engineering organizations.
• Strong understanding of distributed systems principles, including consistency models, replication, sharding, and consensus algorithms (Raft, Paxos).
• Deep knowledge of security best practices, including encryption, access control (IAM), and compliance standards (SOC2, GDPR, HIPAA).
• Experience mentoring senior engineers and driving high-impact engineering initiatives.

Core Requirements
1. Expertise in Large-Scale Storage Architectures

• Deep understanding of AWS storage services (S3, EBS, EFS, FSx, Glacier, DynamoDB).
• Experience designing and managing large data size storage systems with high availability and low-latency requirements.
• Strong knowledge of storage durability, consistency models, replication strategies, and erasure coding.

2. Strong Background in Distributed Systems

• Experience building highly available, fault-tolerant, and scalable distributed storage solutions.
• Deep understanding of CAP theorem, consensus algorithms (Raft, Paxos), and quorum-based replication.
• Hands-on experience with distributed file systems, object stores, and NoSQL databases.

3. Performance Optimization & Cost Efficiency

• Strong experience with data partitioning, sharding, caching strategies (Redis, Memcached), and compression techniques.
• Ability to optimize storage retrieval performance, minimize AWS storage costs, and implement lifecycle policies.
• Expertise in observability, profiling, and performance tuning in large-scale storage solutions.

4. Deep Experience in Data Integrity, Security & Compliance

• Strong knowledge of encryption mechanisms (KMS, HSM), authentication (IAM, STS), and data access policies.
• Experience in designing multi-tenant storage solutions while ensuring data isolation and security.
• Familiarity with compliance frameworks (SOC2, GDPR, HIPAA, FedRAMP) for enterprise storage solutions.

5. Experience with High-Scale Streaming & Event-Driven Processing

• Understanding of AWS streaming services (Kinesis, MSK, SNS, SQS, EventBridge) for storage event handling.
• Experience with CDC (Change Data Capture) pipelines and real-time storage updates.
• Knowledge of log-structured storage engines for high-throughput ingestion.

6. Leadership & Technical Strategy

• Experience driving technical roadmaps and architectural vision for backend storage teams.
• Ability to mentor senior engineers and lead design reviews across the org.
• Proven ability to communicate complex storage architectures to executives and non-technical stakeholders.

7. Hands-On Coding & Problem Solving

• Strong programming skills in Kotlin, Java, Go, Rust, or Python for backend storage development.
• Experience with AWS SDKs, storage APIs, and RESTful service architectures.
• Strong debugging, profiling, and incident response skills in production storage environments.

Compensation
At Atlassian, we strive to design equitable, explainable, and competitive compensation programs. To support this goal, the baseline of our range is higher than that of the typical market range, but in turn we expect to hire most candidates near this baseline. Base pay within the range is ultimately determined by a candidate's skills, expertise, or experience. 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: $239,000 - $318,600
Zone B: $215,100 - $286,700
Zone C: $198,300 - $264,400
This role may also be eligible for benefits, bonuses, commissions, and equity.
Please visit go.atlassian.com/payzones 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.
Our perks & benefits
Atlassian offers a variety of perks and benefits to support you, your family and to help you engage with your local community. Our offerings include health coverage, paid volunteer days, wellness resources, and so much more. Visit go.atlassian.com/perksandbenefits to learn more.
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 .