Senior Engineering Manager, Self-Hosted Kafka Infrastructure

About the Team
We are launching a new Self-Hosted Kafka Infrastructure team to migrate from costly cloud-managed solutions. You will own, manage, and scale hundreds of Kafka clusters across a global, multi-cloud Kubernetes environment, focusing on reducing cost, improving control, and boosting performance.
The Role
We seek a founding Senior Engineering Manager to lead the strategic build-out and migration to our self-hosted Kafka platform. This technical role requires deep distributed systems expertise and compassionate leadership. You will define the architecture and lead the team to deliver a Control Plane that automates the lifecycle of hundreds of global Kafka clusters.
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.
Key Responsibilities
1. Technical Strategy & Control Plane Engineering

• Control Plane Development: Design and implement the Kafka Control Plane to automate provisioning, scaling, upgrading, and self-healing.
• Migration Execution: Lead the transition of critical workloads from cloud-managed solutions to the self-hosted platform.
• Kafka Internals: Guide the team on Kafka internals (KRaft migration, partition rebalancing, tiered storage).
• Cloud Infrastructure: Manage stateful streaming workloads on Kubernetes (EKS/GKE/AKS) across multi-cloud regions.

2. People Management & Culture

• Empathetic Leadership: Lead, mentor, and develop a team of senior distributed systems engineers, fostering high performance and psychological safety.
• Operational Excellence: Set rigorous standards to ensure the team prioritizes engineering fixes for operational toil and maintains healthy on-call rotations.

3. Cross-Organization Collaboration

• Architecture Partnership: Collaborate with Product Engineering, Data Platform, and AI/ML teams to optimize streaming architecture, reducing latency and cost.
• Client Advocacy: Support client services migration by tuning producers and consumers for optimal performance on the new platform.

Qualifications
Must-Haves

• Management Experience: Over 5 years managing engineering teams, with a record of hiring and developing senior talent.
• Kafka Mastery: Deep knowledge of Apache Kafka internals and experience operating Kafka at scale.
• Kubernetes & Cloud: Experience managing stateful workloads on Kubernetes in public clouds (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
• Automation Mindset: History of prioritizing "software over operations"; experience building operators/control planes (Go, Java, or Python).

Nice-to-Haves

• Experience with Apache Kafka or its ecosystem tools (Strimzi, Cruise Control).
• Experience with Service Mesh (Istio or Linkerd) for traffic management.

Success Metrics (First 12 Months)

• Successful transition: Complete migration of the first critical services to the self-hosted platform.
• Control plane MVP: Deliver the initial centralized control plane managing cluster lifecycle.
• Operational improvement: Cut manual operator intervention by 50% through automation.
• Cost optimization: Reduce infrastructure cost per MB/s throughput versus the previous managed solution.

Why Join Us?
This foundational engineering role drives a strategic change that impacts our bottom line and technical capabilities. You will build and scale a platform few companies attempt, leading a mission-critical function from day one.
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 .