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.
Responsibilities:
We are looking for a Senior Engineering Manager to lead the technical evolution of the control plane managing millions of PostgreSQL databases worldwide — powering all Atlassian products and internal services including Jira and Confluence.
This is a critical leadership role at the intersection of large-scale distributed systems, database orchestration, and cloud platform engineering. You will own the strategy, delivery, and operational excellence of a platform that underpins Atlassian's entire product suite. Your team is responsible for ensuring high availability, quality, and seamless orchestration of data migrations at global scale.
You will lead a team of 14 engineers distributed across Australia and New Zealand, fostering a high-performance culture while navigating the complexity of operating one of the world's largest managed PostgreSQL fleets on Kubernetes.
Lead and grow a high-performing engineering team
Build, mentor, and retain a team of 14 engineers across multiple time zones (AU/NZ), fostering an inclusive, high-ownership culture aligned with Atlassian values.
Coach and develop Tech Leads and Senior Engineers, providing career growth through sponsorship, stretch opportunities, and regular feedback.
Drive engineering excellence in code quality, system design, testing, observability, and incident response.
Own technical strategy and delivery
Lead the technical evolution of the database control plane — defining the architecture, roadmap, and delivery plans for managing millions of databases at global scale.
Drive critical deliverables around high availability, quality, and orchestration of data migrations across the fleet.
Guide the team through complex trade-offs around reliability, scalability, performance, and cost.
Ensure appropriate investment in foundational platform capabilities (observability, security, automation, tooling) while shipping customer-impacting value.
Collaborate across the organisation
Partner with Product, Architecture, and peer engineering teams to shape strategy and align on priorities.
Represent the team's technical direction to senior leadership, communicating risks, status, and opportunities clearly.
Drive operational excellence — define SLOs, manage incidents, and continuously improve reliability for a Tier 0 platform.
Required:
8+ years of software engineering experience, with 5+ years managing engineering teams (10+ engineers).
Deep experience with large-scale distributed systems, particularly database platforms or storage infrastructure.
Strong understanding of PostgreSQL or similar relational database systems at scale.
Experience with Kubernetes and cloud-native technologies (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
Proven track record of delivering complex, high-availability systems in production.
Experience orchestrating data migrations, schema changes, or fleet-wide upgrades with minimal downtime.
Excellent communication skills — able to influence technical and non-technical stakeholders alike.
Experience managing distributed teams across multiple locations/time zones.
Preferred:
Experience operating database-as-a-service or managed database platforms.
Familiarity with control plane design patterns (reconciliation loops, declarative APIs, operator frameworks).
Experience with multi-cloud or multi-region deployments.
Proficiency in Go, Java, Kotlin, or similar languages used in platform engineering.
Background in SRE practices, incident management, and operational maturity for Tier 0/1 services.
Qualifications:
Benefits & Perks
Atlassian 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 Atlassian
At 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.
