Senior Engineering Manager - Core Engineering, Trusted Data Platform

Atlassian develops software products and collaboration tools that help teams work together and achieve their goals. The Senior Engineering Manager will lead the Trusted Data Platform SQL engineering team, overseeing people, strategy, execution, operational health, reliability, security, and enterprise capabilities. The role will also drive cross-functional partnerships, platform adoption, technical direction, and sustainable cost efficiency.

Responsibilities:

• Lead, coach, and develop engineering managers and engineers, establishing clear expectations and accountability
• Build an inclusive, high-performing team through effective hiring, onboarding, talent development, and succession planning
• Develop senior technical and leadership talent by delegating meaningful ownership to managers and senior engineers
• Establish operating practices that support good decisions, predictable execution, and continuous improvement
• Manage capacity across strategic investments, customer commitments, operational work, and technical debt
• Define and execute the TDP SQL strategy and roadmap in alignment with Atlassian’s broader data-platform and cloud-infrastructure goals
• Translate enterprise, product, and platform requirements into measurable outcomes, milestones, and engineering plans
• Surface delivery risks, cross-team dependencies, capacity constraints, and required trade-offs early
• Establish clear ownership and decision-making responsibilities across TDP SQL and its partner teams
• Increase platform adoption by reducing integration complexity and delivering well-supported, production-ready capabilities
• Own the operational health of TDP SQL, including availability, durability, performance, security, compliance, and recoverability
• Establish service-level objectives, operational indicators, review mechanisms, and sustainable on-call practices
• Lead the response to material incidents and ensure that lessons produce durable technical and organizational improvements
• Ensure the platform supports enterprise needs such as data residency, encryption, backup and recovery, disaster recovery, and regulated environments
• Maintain clear visibility into customer commitments and intervene when delivery or reliability risks threaten those outcomes
• Partner with senior technical leaders to establish architectural direction and make high-quality technical decisions
• Guide the platform’s evolution across multiple cloud providers and specialized operating environments
• Ensure designs account for scalability, tenant isolation, migration safety, security, operability, and reversibility
• Balance near-term delivery with platform simplification, lifecycle management, and reduction of operational burden
• Establish clear technical and operational contracts with dependent infrastructure and customer teams
• Build trusted partnerships across product, engineering, security, compliance, reliability, infrastructure, and customer-facing teams
• Resolve cross-organizational dependencies through explicit owners, acceptance criteria, and delivery dates
• Represent TDP SQL in engineering reviews, leadership forums, operational reviews, and portfolio planning
• Own the platform’s cost posture, including infrastructure efficiency, demand forecasting, unit economics, and cost attribution
• Make investment decisions that prioritize customer trust, strategic platform value, and sustainable cost efficiency

Requirements:

• Significant engineering leadership experience
• Demonstrated success building or operating a business-critical distributed system, database platform, storage service, or comparable infrastructure product
• Strong people leadership skills, including coaching, performance management, organizational design, hiring, and succession planning
• Experience converting ambiguous strategies and customer requirements into clear roadmaps, execution plans, and measurable outcomes
• Strong understanding of distributed systems, databases, cloud infrastructure, reliability engineering, security, and operational risk
• Experience delivering enterprise capabilities such as data residency, encryption, compliance, disaster recovery, or tenant isolation
• Proven ability to lead incident response and convert operational learning into lasting improvements
• Strong cross-functional influence and experience resolving dependencies between organizations with different priorities
• Sound judgment when balancing reliability, strategic alignment, delivery speed, cost, and technical sustainability
• Clear communication skills appropriate for engineers, executives, product partners, and customer-facing stakeholders
• Experience with managed SQL platforms (TiDB is a plus), distributed relational databases, multi-cloud infrastructure, large-scale migrations, or internal developer platforms is beneficial but not required