Atlassian to scour banks, start-ups and other tech companies for 1000 new engineers

The tech company has poached a key Meta executive to scour for talent as it plans to reach 25,000 staff, putting it on a par with the likes of Qantas and Telstra.

Atlassian’s new chief technology officer has only been in the role for about a month, but he already has been loaded with one of the company’s most challenging asks.

Rajeev Rajan, a former senior executive at Facebook’s parent Meta and Microsoft, has been tasked with hiring a whopping new 1000 new engineers across Australia over the next 12 months, which would tip the company’s global workforce above 10,000, as it aims to reach 25,000 staff in the next four years.

That would put it on par with Telstra, which has a total workforce of around 29,000, and Qantas, which has an estimated 22,000 workers.

Mr Rajan will scour banks, start-ups and other technology companies to make the hires, which come at a critical time for the company which is in the midst of shifting its software products to the cloud. Before joining Atlassian he led Meta’s Seattle-based engineering team of about 9000 workers.

“When I talked to Scott (Farquhar) and Mike (Cannon-Brookes) I was just blown away by them and their aspiration of where they want to take the company,” Mr Rajan said.

“They want this to be a top-five engineering company in the world. I’ve been at some big companies but when I was thinking where I could be most valuable to the world, Atlassian was it, and I decided to take them up on their offer.

“I would love for Atlassian to be in the top five for when engineers are coming out of college or looking at jobs. I want it to be one of the top names that pops into people’s minds.

“For engineers, culture is really important, and they are attracted to a strong mission as well. They want to work somewhere that they’re excited about.”

Supplied Editorial Atlassian chief technology officer Rajeev Rajan. Source: Supplied.

Atlassian was still in a high-growth phase despite being now more than a decade old, Mr Rajan said.

The company produces software that teams use to collaborate with each another, and has grown from being aimed at IT workers to teams across industries.

“My leadership philosophy is one of ‘head in the clouds, feet on the ground’, so while you have that big vision of where you want to take a company, you also want to execute towards that,” he said.

“When you take a code base, for example, if you say you’re just going to rewrite the whole thing, usually those projects fail because they’re too ambitious and don’t take off. What you want to do is take a third and rewrite that over a year, and just do it in a slower way, and we’re applying some of that in our journey.”

While technology stocks have been hit hard in 2022 Atlassian has proven relatively resilient, with its shares down 34 per cent in the year to date, less than most of its competitors. Even though valuations have declined and the global economy has weakened, Atlassian, which trades on the US Nasdaq market, has been able to generate strong free cash flow and is likely to keep generating 50 per cent year-over-year growth in fiscal 2023 and 2024, analysts say.

The executive grew up in India and said one of his highlights working for an Australian company to date has been being able to visit the MCG, and the Don Bradman Museum.

In April Atlassian suffered a multi-week outage that it blamed on a faulty script and miscommunication. Hundreds of customers had their websites deleted or taken offline, in the incident that predated Mr Rajan‘s tenure.

Still, he described the event as a “big wake up call”.

“We’re early in our cloud transformation, and while we had prepared for a few things, this took us by surprise,” he said. ”We are using it as an opportunity to learn, to harden our systems and build back trust with customers.

“Whether it’s reliability or security or compliance, we are doing a number of investments across the board to make sure that we keep that (trust). Microsoft had this as well; you will have outages, and you will have situations where things go down, but how you react to it and how you learn from it is the important part.”