Senior Machine Learning Engineer - Agentic Search

About the role

Atlassian is looking for a Senior Machine Learning Engineer to join its Agentic Search team, part of Search Relevance. You will build agentic search systems that help people and AI agents find relevant enterprise knowledge, reason through complex questions and complete tasks across products and tools. The team works with product, search infrastructure, modeling and evaluation teams, using AI tools to prototype, build, evaluate and learn.

Key responsibilities

• Build and deliver agentic search capabilities for AI assistants and developer workflows via APIs, command-line tools and protocols such as the Model Context Protocol (MCP).
• Create reproducible benchmarks and evaluation tools that reflect realistic tasks across models and agent environments.
• Use evaluation results, production signals and developer feedback to improve search strategies, model behavior, tool interfaces, schemas and context selection.
• Build systems that interpret user intent, plan and run searches, pick sources and tools and adapt to retrieved evidence.
• Explore advances in LLMs and agent systems, including prompting, model selection, training data and fine-tuning, and bring proven approaches into production.
• Own projects from problem definition and design through experimentation, deployment and ongoing measurement, respecting enterprise permissions and data boundaries.
• Work with product, search and AI teams, contribute to design and code reviews, mentor engineers and help evolve engineering practices.

Required profile

• Bachelor's or master's degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 4+ years of relevant industry experience in machine learning, including delivering ML capabilities into production.
• Experience designing experiments, building evaluation datasets and analyzing model and system behavior.
• Understanding of the ML development lifecycle, from data preparation and modeling to deployment, monitoring and iteration.
• Ability to lead ambiguous technical projects, learn quickly, make trade-offs and communicate clearly with engineering and product partners.

Required skills

• Strong Python programming and the ability to build reliable, maintainable production systems.
• Experience in LLM applications, AI agents, information retrieval, search relevance or natural language processing.
• Regular use of AI tools in daily engineering work, with judgment to validate their outputs.

Nice to have: experience with tool-using agents, APIs or interfaces for AI agents (including MCP), agent evaluations or benchmarks, semantic or hybrid retrieval, LLM fine-tuning, and distributed data processing or cloud ML environments such as Spark, AWS or Databricks.

What we offer

• Base pay for new hires depending on location: Zone A $206,100-$269,075, Zone B $185,490-$242,168, Zone C $171,063-$223,332.
• Possible eligibility for benefits, bonuses, commissions and equity.
• Health and wellbeing resources and paid volunteer days among other perks.