Principal Backend Engineer

About the role

The Growth Platform team builds foundational systems for engagement, messaging and personalized user experiences across Atlassian's products (Jira, Confluence, Trello, Loom and more). As Principal Backend Engineer, you will be the senior technical authority for client-side architecture of the messaging and personalization engines, leading architectural direction across multiple squads and partnering with product leaders. The role is fully remote, based in the United States, with virtual interviews and onboarding.

Key responsibilities

• Define the long-term technical roadmap, design patterns and architectural standards for high-throughput, low-latency distributed backend services and data pipelines for messaging, notifications, personalization and experimentation.
• Design, build and operate resilient microservices, relational and non-relational data models, event-driven streaming pipelines (e.g. Kafka) and REST, GraphQL and gRPC APIs.
• Make architectural trade-off decisions on scalability, data consistency, availability, latency, multi-region disaster recovery and security compliance.
• Partner with Product Managers, Data Engineering, frontend platform teams and product squads to set clean service boundaries and unified platform contracts.
• Mentor Senior and Mid-level engineers, lead RFCs and ADRs, and promote backend best practices, cost optimization and developer productivity.
• Champion observability (distributed tracing, SLOs/SLIs, alerting), load testing, chaos engineering and continuous deployment pipelines.

Required profile

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, specializing in distributed systems, scalable cloud services and backend architecture.
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Staff / Principal Engineer or Technical Lead track record, owning end-to-end backend architecture for large-scale, high-concurrency SaaS platforms.
• Experience writing RFCs/ADRs, defining technical roadmaps and mentoring senior engineers.
• Hands-on experience in cloud environments (AWS/GCP), containerization, microservices, CI/CD and production telemetry.

Required skills

• Server-side languages such as Java, Kotlin, Go, Python or TypeScript/Node.js.
• API design: REST, GraphQL, gRPC.
• Distributed systems and data modeling, including Kafka and event-driven architectures.

What we offer

• Base pay for new hires in the United States ranging from $174,051 to $273,775 depending on pay zone.
• Possible eligibility for benefits, bonuses, commissions and equity.
• Remote work with virtual interviews and onboarding.