Principal Engineer, Backend Engineering

Overview Atlassian's internal AI usage is growing rapidly across engineering, driven by adoption of tools like Codex, Cursor, Claude Code, and Rovo CLI. This growth is a signal of value, and we need a Principal Engineer to build the infrastructure that makes it sustainable.You will own the technical vision and architecture for the DevInfra AI Front Proxy, a cloud-hosted service that sits at the developer-workflow boundary and governs every internal model call against cost, trust, context, and attribution constraints. The proxy spans three integration surfaces: managed local configuration pushed via MDM, the cloud proxy service itself, and a browser extension for web AI interfaces. It is the single layer through which all internal AI traffic flows for cost enforcement, security policy integration, model routing, semantic caching, and telemetry.This is a high-impact, high-ambiguity role. You will partner with teams across developer infrastructure, AI platform, security and compliance, and developer tooling to define and ship the platform that makes exponential AI usage growth safe, measurable, and cost-efficient at Atlassian scale. Responsibilities Set the technical direction for the AI proxy platform across three pillars: cost efficiency and ROI insights, secure AI usage, and AI context integration.Design and deliver the proxy service architecture targeting 99.95% or higher availability, while maintaining sub-second latency to preserve developer experience across all routed AI traffic.Own the cost-efficiency stack: integration with internal usage quota enforcement systems with near real-time cap enforcement, semantic caching and context reuse across tools, model routing and downgrade policies, and workflow-level cost attribution.Define the security integration surface so that security, compliance, and supply chain governance teams can enforce policies at machine speed across all internal AI tools through shared hooks, rather than building bespoke runtimes per tool.Drive the context integration layer: connecting with context infrastructure and repository harness, enabling skills and tool registry sharing across AI tools, progressive disclosure of context, and agent quality benchmarking across tools and repositories.Lead technical decisions on cloud infrastructure integration for model execution, output token optimization strategies, intelligent model routing, and context compression tooling rollout.Partner with AI platform, security, compliance, and developer tooling teams to maintain alignment across a multi-team initiative with significant cross-functional coordination requirements.Mentor and uplift a team of engineers across multiple delivery streams covering reliability, usage governance, and proxy core, while reserving sufficient capacity for system reliability alongside feature delivery.Establish and own the telemetry and observability stack: dashboards for agent and CI traffic, cache hit rates, workflow effectiveness, cost per successful workflow, and ROI attribution by tool, team, and user. 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: $209,700 - $273,775Zone B: $188,730 - $246,398Zone C: $174,051 - $227,233 Qualifications Benefits & PerksAtlassian 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 AtlassianAt 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.Job SummaryCategory: Engineering