Principal Engineer, Backend Engineering

About the role

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 signals 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.

Qualifications

While not explicitly listed, the role implies deep expertise in cloud infrastructure, AI/ML systems, security, and large-scale distributed systems, along with leadership experience in high-ambiguity technical environments.

Pay

Atlassian follows consistent hiring practices and accounts for each candidate's skills, knowledge, and experience when setting base pay within the range. This role may also be eligible for benefits, bonuses, commissions, and equity.

In the United States, this role has three geographic pay zones. 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

For more information on pay zones, visit go.atlassian.com/payzones. Confirm your specific zone with your recruiter.

Benefits

Atlassian offers a wide range of perks and benefits designed to support you, your family, and your community. These include:

• Health and wellbeing resources
• Paid volunteer days
• And much more

To learn more, visit go.atlassian.com/perksandbenefits.