Senior Principal Software Engineer JIRA Search

Overview

Jira Platform

Vision

Jira Platform will enable Jira to become the trusted, agent-native system of record and control plane for human and agent teamwork at enterprise scale.

To turn this vision into reality, we propose to focus on the three forces we believe will work together to create the flywheel that will be Jira Platform , helping drive the engine that is Jira:

AI TRANSFORMATION: Make Jira the agent‑native system of record and control plane for human+AI teamwork.

ENTERPRISE READINESS Continue to invest in Enterprise features, and take advantage of the limited-time window due to Project Ascend to bring the world’s largest and most demanding enterprises into the Cloud

EFFICIENCY As the underlying platform serving Jira cloud customers, and a growing agentic workload, we need to provide a platform that has sound unit economics, accelerates developer productivity, and delivers world-class reliability.

Your future team

Jira Scalable Issue Search (JSIS) is a foundational investment in Jira platform, moving structured searches from a database-backed engine to OpenSearch. Operating at approximately 3 billion requests per day, JSIS is one of Atlassian’s largest services. Its multi-tenant, distributed architecture positions search to deliver the performance and scale customers expect as Jira grows.

More than 50 engineers across India and Europe, working alongside product managers, are driving this transformation. At JSIS’s scale, every release can affect customers across geographies, making reliability, performance, and customer impact central to the team’s decisions. This combination of technical depth and product focus gives the team the capacity to address adoption barriers while improving the search experience.

The long-term opportunity extends beyond search: JSIS will provide the foundation for federated search across Jira portfolios and, ultimately, a shared search capability across Atlassian products. Building for that future will position the platform to support new search experiences and the higher request volumes anticipated from agentic APIs—turning today’s architectural migration into a strategic advantage for the broader ecosystem.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical evolution and long-term architecture of the team, shaping strategy for enterprise-scale data movement, governance, resiliency, and data health.

• Lead the largest architectural initiatives across Jira Platform, from strategy and milestones through delivery, adoption, and customer outcomes.

• Define and drive a 12–24 month roadmap for shared platform primitives, identify gaps, and make clear trade-offs on priorities.

• Raise standards for reliability, performance, observability, security, and operational excellence across systems handling critical enterprise data.

• Provide hands-on technical leadership via design reviews, deep investigations, incident reviews, and high-risk problem solving while mentoring Principal and senior engineers.

Qualifications

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience

• 12+ years of experience developing large scale distributed systems.

• 4+ years of experience providing architectural oversight and technical leadership.

• SQL/No-SQL datastores - preferably Postgresql and Opensearch

• Data streaming (Kafka/Flink) and CDC eventing

• Soft skills - Driving complex step-change initiative across distributed cross-org setup with influence/buy-in from senior leadership