Principal Software Engineer - Jira Platform Search

About the role

The Jira Platform Search organization powers the foundational search backend for the entire Jira product suite, serving billions of requests daily across a multi-tenant architecture. It is undergoing a multi-year architectural transformation to support greater scale and usage patterns. As Principal Software Engineer for the Jira Platform Search team, you will architect and lead high-scale search solutions across engineering teams, working with Engineering Managers, Product Managers and Architects to steer multi-quarter roadmaps and deliver Tier-0 reliability.

Key responsibilities

• Drive solutions for high-complexity problems from architectural design through to production launch.
• Define technical roadmaps, scoping and execution strategies for large-scale engineering initiatives.
• Resolve complex systems design challenges and establish scalable architectural standards.
• Lead code reviews, technical documentation and the diagnosis and resolution of critical system defects.
• Set benchmarks for code review practices across the team.
• Partner with cross-functional teams on company-wide programs and mentor emerging engineering talent.

Required profile

• 10+ years in hands-on software or technology architect roles, owning end-to-end SDLC; Bachelor's degree preferred, ideally in Computer Science.
• Proven track record architecting, operating and scaling high-throughput distributed systems and cloud services (e.g. AWS, GCP).
• Ability to quickly master new technology stacks and adapt to new domains.

Required skills

• Deep production expertise in OpenSearch or Elasticsearch and a strong understanding of Lucene indexing and query execution.
• Experience designing tenant isolation, data partitioning, shard placement, routing and capacity strategies for distributed search systems.
• Improvements to search latency, indexing throughput, availability and infrastructure efficiency, with measurable outcomes.
• Expertise in ingestion, index freshness, data correctness, permission-aware search and online reindexing.
• Distributed architectures, cloud-native services and asynchronous/event-driven systems (PostgreSQL, Kafka, DynamoDB, etc.).
• Preferred: hands-on familiarity with Java, Kotlin or Kubernetes.