Senior Principal Machine Learning Systems Engineer, Search Platform
Atlassian
Listing collected from Atlassian's career site. NextChapter is independent of Atlassian.
Seattle, WA · $226k–$356k a year · Posted October 21, 2026
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Where Seattle, WA ranks
Where Seattle, WA placed in our monthly rankings, month by month. Each month stays online at its own address.
November 2026
- #1Cities with the most jobs that do not need a four-year degree in the Pacific Northwest316 jobs · of 8
- #1Best cities for software and engineering jobs in the Pacific Northwest1,776 openings · of 14
- #2Best cities for energy and utilities pay after cost of living$180k · of 18
- #2Best cities for entry-level jobs that want AI skills in the Pacific Northwest17% · of 12
- #2Best cities for AI-skill jobs in the Pacific Northwest26% · of 17
- #2Best cities for software and engineering jobs in the West Coast1,776 openings · of 60
Rankings about data & analytics jobs
- Best cities for data and analytics jobs #1 New York (1,713 openings)
- Best cities for data and analytics pay after cost of living #1 Foster ($232k)
- Most requested AI skills in data and analytics jobs #1 Machine learning engineering (17.1%)
- AI tools named most often in data and analytics jobs #1 Databricks (7.6%)
- Employers with the most data and analytics jobs #1 Amazon (711 roles)
Data & Analytics jobs · Top Data & Analytics employers · All rankings
How AI is used in this kind of work
Among computer and information research scientists, AI is already used for a large share of the tasks. Measured exposure for computer and information research scientists: 34% (high).
Share of this job’s tasks that AI is already used for at work, from real usage. It is not a forecast of job loss, and a low number means no use seen yet. Source: Anthropic Economic Index.
Atlassian has filed one layoff notice in the last twelve months, covering 63 workers, most recently March 2026. These are public filings with state labor departments, and an open role can sit alongside them. See the filings
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About the job
Overview
Working at Atlassian
Atlassians can choose where they work – whether in an office, from home, or a combination of the two. That way, Atlassians have more control over supporting their family, personal goals, and other priorities. We can hire people in any country where we have a legal entity.
Responsibilities
Your future team: Search Platform
The Search Platform team is responsible for powering Rovo Search , knowledge discovery and search for humans and agents across all enterprise data. Our mission is to make all our customers' knowledge across Atlassian and their external apps (i.e. third-party applications) searchable securely and reliably through an insanely fast, globally scalable, cost-efficient, enterprise grade search infrastructure. Powering search and discovery in the agentic era is a whole new challenge that you will help lead.
As the technical lead for Search Serving, you will set its long-term technical direction and be accountable for its contribution to end-to-end search quality, tail latency, reliability, scalability, operability, and cost. You will work with Relevance, Search Data, and Product to determine where new ML capabilities can meaningfully change search experience, quality and platform capabilties.
Responsibilities
Design and build high quality agentic search systems, addressing tail latency, throughput, concurrency, caching, sharding, fault isolation, capacity, and graceful degradation.
Set the long-term architecture and technical roadmap for online retrieval, index serving, query processing, and ML inference. Turn advances in information retrieval and machine learning into production systems through rigorous evaluation, experimentation, and incremental adoption.
Establish strong ML production practices spanning offline and online evaluation, experimentation, observability, safe rollout and rollback, model-quality regressions, and incident response.
Advance production inference for embedding, retrieval, and ranking models through techniques such as batching, quantization, distillation, compilation, and hardware-aware optimization.
Lead step-change initiatives across multiple teams, simplify fragmented systems, mentor senior engineers, and align technical and product leaders around long-term direction. Uplevel team and platform maturity to best-in-class agentic development practices to accelerate innovation.
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 : $272,700 - $356,025
Zone B : $245,430 - $320,423
Zone C : $226,341 - $295,501
Qualifications
Requirements
10+ years of relevant experience, including designing and operating large-scale, low-latency search, recommendation, advertising, or retrieval systems.
Deep ML systems experience, including production inference, model optimization, retrieval and ranking pipelines, evaluation, experimentation, and operations.
Strong distributed-systems expertise across performance, concurrency, availability, multi-tenancy, capacity planning, observability, and cost efficiency.
Strong information-retrieval and applied-ML foundations, with practical experience across lexical, semantic, vector, or hybrid retrieval.
A track record of setting cross-organization technical direction, resolving consequential architecture choices, and delivering through multiple teams and senior technical leaders.
Strong product and technical judgment: framing important problems, testing hypotheses, comparing alternatives, and stopping investments whose value does not justify their complexity.
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
At Atlassian, we're motivated by a common goal: to unleash the potential of every team. Our software products help teams all over the planet and our solutions are designed for all types of work. Team collaboration through our tools makes what may be impossible alone, possible together.
We believe that the unique contributions of all Atlassians create our success. To ensure that our products and culture continue to incorporate everyone's perspectives and experience, we never discriminate based on race, religion, national origin, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, or marital, veteran, or disability status. All your information will be kept confidential according to EEO guidelines.
To provide you the best experience, we can support with accommodations or adjustments at any stage of the recruitment process. Simply inform our Recruitment team during your conversation with them.
To learn more about our culture and hiring process, visit go.atlassian.com/crh .
In line with local law, identity verification (which may include use of biometric data) is a condition of employment with Atlassian for employment fraud purposes.