Principal Backend Engineer

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.

Bachelors 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).