Atlassian

Principal Engineer, Backend Engineering

Atlassian$174K — $273K *
US-AnywhereRemote in San Francisco, CA
Enterprise Technology
Less than 5 years of experience
Job Overview by Ladders

Qualifications

  • Proven experience in cloud infrastructure architecture and design.
  • Strong background in handling AI-related infrastructure challenges.
  • Expertise in cost management and performance optimization.
  • Demonstrated ability to lead cross-functional teams and initiatives.
  • Experience with telemetry and observability systems.

Responsibilities

  • Set the technical direction for the AI proxy platform based on cost, security, and integration.
  • Design reliable and high-availability architecture for AI traffic management.
  • Own and improve cost-efficiency stacks for AI model usage.
  • Define security integration for compliance across AI usage.
  • Drive integration of contextual data across AI tools and workflows.
  • Lead decisions on cloud infrastructure for AI model execution and optimization.
  • Mentor engineers while balancing system reliability with new feature delivery.
  • Establish observability metrics for usage analysis and ROI.

Benefits

  • Health and wellbeing resources.
  • Paid volunteer days.
  • Engagement opportunities with the local community.
Full Job Description
Overview

Atlassian's internal AI usage is growing rapidly across engineering, driven by adoption of tools like Codex, Cursor, Claude Code, and Rovo CLI. This growth is a signal of value, and we need a Principal Engineer to build the infrastructure that makes it sustainable.

You will own the technical vision and architecture for the DevInfra AI Front Proxy, a cloud-hosted service that sits at the developer-workflow boundary and governs every internal model call against cost, trust, context, and attribution constraints. The proxy spans three integration surfaces: managed local configuration pushed via MDM, the cloud proxy service itself, and a browser extension for web AI interfaces. It is the single layer through which all internal AI traffic flows for cost enforcement, security policy integration, model routing, semantic caching, and telemetry.

This is a high-impact, high-ambiguity role. You will partner with teams across developer infrastructure, AI platform, security and compliance, and developer tooling to define and ship the platform that makes exponential AI usage growth safe, measurable, and cost-efficient at Atlassian scale.

Responsibilities
  • Set the technical direction for the AI proxy platform across three pillars: cost efficiency and ROI insights, secure AI usage, and AI context integration.

  • Design and deliver the proxy service architecture targeting 99.95% or higher availability, while maintaining sub-second latency to preserve developer experience across all routed AI traffic.

  • Own the cost-efficiency stack: integration with internal usage quota enforcement systems with near real-time cap enforcement, semantic caching and context reuse across tools, model routing and downgrade policies, and workflow-level cost attribution.

  • Define the security integration surface so that security, compliance, and supply chain governance teams can enforce policies at machine speed across all internal AI tools through shared hooks, rather than building bespoke runtimes per tool.

  • Drive the context integration layer: connecting with context infrastructure and repository harness, enabling skills and tool registry sharing across AI tools, progressive disclosure of context, and agent quality benchmarking across tools and repositories.

  • Lead technical decisions on cloud infrastructure integration for model execution, output token optimization strategies, intelligent model routing, and context compression tooling rollout.

  • Partner with AI platform, security, compliance, and developer tooling teams to maintain alignment across a multi-team initiative with significant cross-functional coordination requirements.

  • Mentor and uplift a team of engineers across multiple delivery streams covering reliability, usage governance, and proxy core, while reserving sufficient capacity for system reliability alongside feature delivery.

  • Establish and own the telemetry and observability stack: dashboards for agent and CI traffic, cache hit rates, workflow effectiveness, cost per successful workflow, and ROI attribution by tool, team, and user.

Compensation

At Atlassian, we strive to design equitable, explainable, and competitive compensation programs. We follow consistent hiring practices and account for each candidate's skills, knowledge, and experience when setting base pay within the range.

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.

This role may also be eligible for benefits, bonuses, commissions, and equity.

Pay Ranges

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: $209,700 - $273,775

Zone B: $188,730 - $246,398

Zone C: $174,051 - $227,233

Qualifications

Benefits & Perks

Atlassian offers a wide range of perks and benefits designed to support you, your family and to help you engage with your local community. Our offerings include health and wellbeing resources, paid volunteer days, and so much more. To learn more, visit go.atlassian.com/perksandbenefits.

About Atlassian

Atlassian is a leading provider of collaboration, development, and issue tracking software for teams. With over 194,000 customers worldwide, including 85 of the Fortune 100, Atlassian is changing the way teams work. Our products help teams organize, discuss, and complete shared work. Atlassian has a unique business model that allows us to deliver software to teams of all sizes, from small startups to large enterprises. Our products are available on a subscription basis, with no upfront fees or long-term commitments. Atlassian was founded in 2002 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California.
Learn more about Atlassian
Size
6,433 employees
Market Cap
$31.9 billion
Industry
Net Income
-$1.1 billion
Founded
2002
5 Year Trend
+34.9%
Revenue
$1.8 billion
NASDAQ

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