Principal Backend 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. Interviews and onboarding are conducted virtually, a part of being a distributed-first company. To help our teams work together effectively, this role is fully remote, but requires you to be located in the United States. Your Future Team The Growth Platform team builds foundational systems that power engagement, messaging, and personalized user experiences across Atlassian’s entire product ecosystem (Jira, Confluence, Trello, Loom, and beyond). We operate at the intersection of high-scale distributed systems, client-side performance, and experimentation—enabling product teams to deliver cohesive, data-driven customer journeys to millions of daily active users. As a Principal Backed Engineer , you will serve as the senior technical authority for client-side architecture across our messaging and personalization engines. You will lead architectural direction across multiple squads, partner with product leaders, and establish standard patterns that ensure our user-facing experiences are resilient, fast, accessible, and scalable. Lead Distributed Systems Architecture & Technical Strategy: Define the long-term technical roadmap, system design patterns, and architectural standards for high-throughput, low-latency distributed backend services and data pipelines powering in-product messaging, notifications, personalization, and experimentation platforms. Deliver at Enterprise Scale: Design, build, and operate resilient, fault-tolerant microservices, robust relational/non-relational data models, event-driven streaming pipelines (e.g., Kafka), and high-performance API contracts (REST, GraphQL, gRPC) that integrate seamlessly across Atlassian’s cloud infrastructure. Drive Technical Direction & Trade-offs: Make critical architectural decisions across backend systems—evaluating and balancing horizontal scalability, strict data consistency, high availability, sub-second latency, multi-region isolation/disaster recovery, and security compliance. Cross-Organizational Influence & Platform Adoption: Partner closely with Product Managers, Data Engineering, Client/Frontend Platform teams, and consuming product engineering groups (Jira, Confluence, etc.) to establish clean service boundaries, unified platform contracts, and effortless service integration. Mentor & Elevate Engineering Standards: Actively coach and mentor Senior and Mid-level engineers across backend engineering disciplines, lead system architecture design reviews (RFCs/ADRs), and champion backend best practices, distributed systems patterns, cost optimization, and developer productivity across squads. Foster Operational Excellence & Reliability: Champion comprehensive service telemetry and observability (distributed tracing, SLOs/SLIs, alerting thresholds, and server metrics), automated integration/load testing, chaos engineering, and continuous deployment pipelines to guarantee high availability and resilient production operations. 10+ years of professional software engineering experience , with primary specialization in distributed systems, scalable cloud services, and backend architecture. Bachelor's or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience. Extensive hands-on proficiency in modern backend technologies , including server-side languages (e.g., Java, Kotlin, Go, Python, or TypeScript/Node.js) and API design paradigms (REST, GraphQL, gRPC). Proven track record as a Staff / Principal Engineer or Technical Lead , with demonstrated experience designing, building, and owning end-to-end backend architecture for large-scale, high-concurrency, mission-critical SaaS platforms. Deep distributed systems & data infrastructure domain expertise , including relational and NoSQL data modeling, event-driven architectures (e.g., Kafka, event buses/queues), caching strategies, and performance tuning under high throughput. Demonstrated experience in technical strategy & trade-offs , including writing architecture proposals (RFCs/ADRs), evaluating system trade-offs (scalability, reliability, data consistency, cost), establishing technical roadmaps, and driving engineering excellence across multiple squads. Track record of technical mentorship and cross-functional leadership , with proven ability to coach senior (P50/P40) engineers and partner effectively with Product Management, Design, Frontend, and Platform/Infra stakeholders without formal authority. Commitment to operational excellence and observability , with hands-on experience in cloud environments (AWS/GCP), containerization, microservice architectures, CI/CD automation, and production telemetry (distributed tracing, metrics, SLOs/SLIs).