Job description

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. Atlassian’s Trusted Data Platform (TDP) provides secure, reliable, and scalable data-storage capabilities used by Atlassian product and platform teams. It helps those teams manage persistent customer data while meeting complex enterprise requirements, including data residency, encryption, regulatory compliance, backup and recovery, and operation across multiple cloud environments. TDP SQL is Atlassian’s managed relational database platform. It gives engineering teams a supported way to build applications on relational databases without having to manage the underlying infrastructure, availability, security, scaling, and enterprise controls independently. We are looking for a Senior Engineering Manager to lead the TDP SQL engineering team. This leader will be accountable for the team’s people, strategy, execution, and operational outcomes. They will partner with senior engineers, product and program leaders, infrastructure teams, security specialists, and Atlassian product organizations to evolve TDP SQL as a dependable, easy-to-adopt internal platform. Success in this role means building a strong engineering organization, operating a highly reliable platform, and translating complex customer and infrastructure requirements into a clear and executable roadmap. Team and organizational leadership • 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. Strategy and execution • 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. Reliability and customer trust • 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. Technical and platform leadership • 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. Cross-functional leadership and economics • 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. • 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. 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 . 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. 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.

Requirements

Must-haves

Working at Atlassian
Success in this role means building a strong engineering organization, operating a highly reliable platform, and translating complex customer and infrastructure requirements into a clear and executable roadmap.
Team and organizational leadership
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.
Strategy and execution
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.
Reliability and customer trust
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.
Technical and platform leadership
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.

Nice-to-haves

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.

Application prep

Use the role’s language and application details while tailoring your materials.

Keywords to mirror

sqlgo

Platform: atlassian
Effort: medium