Principal Backend Engineer

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. Interviews and onboarding are conducted virtually, a part of being a distributed-first company. To help our teams work together effectively, this role is fully remote, but requires you to be located in the United States. Your Future Team The Growth Platform team builds foundational systems that power engagement, messaging, and personalized user experiences across Atlassian’s entire product ecosystem (Jira, Confluence, Trello, Loom, and beyond). We operate at the intersection of high-scale distributed systems, client-side performance, and experimentation—enabling product teams to deliver cohesive, data-driven customer journeys to millions of daily active users. As a Principal Frontend Engineer , you will serve as the senior technical authority for client-side architecture across our messaging and personalization engines. You will lead architectural direction across multiple squads, partner with product leaders, and establish standard patterns that ensure our user-facing experiences are resilient, fast, accessible, and scalable.

Responsibilities

• Lead Full-Stack Architecture & Technical Strategy: Define the long-term technical roadmap and architectural patterns spanning distributed backend services, APIs, and client-side integration points for in-product messaging, notifications, personalization, and experimentation frameworks, with an emphasis on scalable server-side systems.

• Deliver at Enterprise Scale: Design and implement resilient, low-latency microservices, robust data models, and clean API contracts, while partnering on modular React/TypeScript components and client SDKs that seamlessly integrate across Atlassian web applications.

• Drive Technical Direction & Trade-offs: Make critical end-to-end architectural decisions—balancing rapid experimentation and rich client rendering performance with distributed systems reliability, data consistency, security, and accessibility.

• Cross-Organizational Influence: Partner closely with Product Managers, Design, Data Engineering, and consuming product engineering teams (Jira, Confluence, etc.) to align on unified full-stack contracts and accelerate platform adoption across product boundaries.

• Mentor & Elevate Engineering Standards: Actively coach and mentor Senior and Mid-level engineers across backend and frontend disciplines, lead system and architecture design reviews (RFCs), and champion software engineering best practices, distributed systems patterns, and developer productivity across the organization.

• Foster Operational Excellence: Champion comprehensive end-to-end telemetry and observability (distributed tracing, server telemetry, and client-side metrics), automated testing, and modern CI/CD pipelines to ensure high availability, resilience, and zero-drift user experiences.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, with primary specialization in modern client-side / frontend architecture and development.

• Bachelor's or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.

• Extensive hands-on proficiency in modern web technologies: React, TypeScript, modern JavaScript (ES6+), HTML5, and modern CSS architectures.

• Proven track record as a Staff / Principal Engineer or Technical Lead, with demonstrated experience designing and owning end-to-end frontend architecture for large-scale, high-traffic SaaS applications.

• Deep browser & client-systems domain expertise, including web performance optimization (Core Web Vitals, bundle-splitting, memory lifecycle, rendering pipelines) and client-side state management architectures.

• Demonstrated experience in technical strategy & trade-offs, including writing architecture proposals (RFCs), establishing technical roadmaps, and setting engineering quality standards across multiple teams or squads.

• Track record of technical mentorship and cross-functional leadership, with proven ability to coach senior (P50/P40) engineers and partner effectively with Product Management, Design, and Backend stakeholders without formal authority.