Principal Machine Learning Engineer

About the role

Atlassian is hiring a Principal Machine Learning Engineer in its Rovo & AI Engineering organization, working remotely. The role contributes to Rovo Chat, Atlassian's fastest-growing area, by bringing cutting-edge innovations to the product and building agent harnesses that improve quality, reliability and latency. It involves leading other engineers from technical design to launch and collaborating with other teams and internal customers.

Key responsibilities

• Set the technical vision for measuring and improving Rovo Chat, turning qualities such as helpfulness, correctness, judgment and reliability into rigorous evaluation strategies.
• Architect and build production ML and evaluation systems at scale, including datasets, simulations, automated judges, regression suites, experimentation platforms and online quality signals.
• Advance agentic capabilities across reasoning, planning, tool selection and use, action correctness, retrieval, memory and long-horizon execution.
• Close the loop between evaluation and product impact: identify failure modes, develop and ship interventions, and measure customer outcomes.
• Make high-leverage decisions on model choice, prompting, fine-tuning, data strategy, system architecture and inference, balancing quality, latency, reliability, safety and cost.
• Lead cross-organizational initiatives with ML, engineering, product, analytics, research and design partners.
• Establish reusable methods, systems and quality standards for AI-powered experiences across Atlassian.
• Mentor engineers through design reviews and technical leadership.

Required profile

• 7+ years of experience as a software developer.
• Track record of architecting and shipping large-scale ML or AI systems with measurable customer and business impact.
• Experience building customer-facing Gen AI applications at scale and pushing the state of the art for quality and reliability.
• Deep understanding of the machine learning project lifecycle.
• Experience leading and supporting senior engineers and working cross-functionally.

Required skills

• Deep experience with LLM-powered products, agentic systems, model evaluation, experimentation and dataset development.
• Strong production engineering skills and hands-on work in a modern ML stack.
• Principal-level technical leadership and excellent judgment on quality, speed, reliability, safety, latency and cost.

What we offer

• Base pay for new hires depending on location: Zone A $236,700-$309,025, Zone B $213,030-$278,123, Zone C $196,461-$256,491.
• Possible eligibility for benefits, bonuses, commissions and equity.
• Health and wellbeing resources and paid volunteer days among other perks.