Senior Principal Engineer, Search Platform

About the role

The Search Platform team powers Rovo Search and knowledge discovery for humans and agents across all enterprise data, aiming to make customer data searchable, secure and fast. As Senior Principal Engineer, you will own the technical roadmap, execution and outcomes for the Search Data pillar, leading other engineers to define strategic technical direction and own results from design to launch.

Key responsibilities

• Define technical strategy and architecture for Search Data with technical leads, partners and internal customers.
• Lead the evolution of the data platform and pipelines to support real-time search freshness and AI/agentic retrieval at enterprise scale.
• Make architectural trade-offs between freshness, correctness, cost and operational simplicity, and own the outcomes.
• Simplify and modernize legacy data processing systems, making them understandable, testable and operable.
• Establish design patterns for schema evolution, partial failures, eventual consistency, connector variability and data quality degradation.
• Own engineering and operational excellence, drive continuous improvement and own key operational metrics.
• Improve developer productivity, champion high ownership, rigorous testing and safe rollouts, and help hire and mentor engineers.

Required profile

• 12+ years of experience imagining, building and operating critical systems at scale.
• Demonstrated department-level technical leadership, influence across teams and ownership of top-level technical objectives.
• Track record of simplifying complex systems.
• Fluency in at least one modern programming language (Java preferred).
• Excellent communication skills, able to explain complex data architecture to engineers, product managers and leadership.

Required skills

• Deep experience with distributed data frameworks such as Kafka, Flink and Spark, having built, operated and debugged systems processing billions of events per day.
• Designing data architectures for heterogeneous data at scale, including schema evolution, data quality, idempotency, backfill/replay and partial failure recovery.

What we offer

• Compensation set within a range based on skills, knowledge and experience; eligibility for benefits, bonuses, commissions and equity.
• Health and wellbeing resources and paid volunteer days.
• Flexible working: office, home or a mix, and hiring in countries where Atlassian has a legal entity.