Vikram Rao, CTO, Enterprise and Chief Trust Officer, Atlassian
Atlassian is positioning its India development centre as a strategic R&D hub as the company expands its use of AI agents and builds products around its Teamwork Graph technology, said Vikram Rao, CTO, Enterprise and Chief Trust Officer at Atlassian.
The India site has grown to more than 2,700 employees, with a large portion working across engineering, product and design, while the company is also expanding its sales workforce in the country, Rao said.
In September 2025, Atlassian announced a new R&D Centre in Bengaluru. Spanning over 2 lakh square feet, the new space is four times the size of the company’s previous Bengaluru office. The teams based in the city are responsible for several of Atlassian’s core product and technology areas, including its Service Collection, machine-learning platform and search capabilities.
“We have a core product line operating out of here called Service Collection, which is a billion-dollar-plus revenue-generating vertical. It operates primarily in IT-service management and caters to DevOps as well as IT Ops, fully running from India,” said Rao. “The entire squad — engineering, product, design — is all here. It’s a core product line. We also have teams here that work on our ML platform that powers our AI stack. We also have a team that works on search, which is core to Atlassian’s mission. India has a strategic side that drives revenue for us.”
The changing role
Rao added that the rapid improvement in AI-assisted software development is lowering the barrier to creating software, but shifting the challenge towards deciding what software should be built and how the resulting workflows should be managed.
“The problem has shifted from how can you create software to creating a lot of software quickly. Therefore, what to create becomes important,” he said.
This shift is also changing the role of software engineers and other knowledge workers. Engineers are increasingly moving from manually writing code towards directing and evaluating AI agents, although human expertise in architecture, design and judgement remains important.
“Previously, an engineer would be hands-on, typing code. This has changed to the engineer being the human who’s orchestrating agents and telling the agent what to do and prompting the agent with the right information to be able to deliver the outcome,” Rao said.
Hiring plans
Atlassian plans to continue expanding its India operations, with hiring across engineering and sales.
Rao said the company has also had success hiring directly from Indian universities, adding that fresh graduates bring an advantage as AI-native workers who can help Atlassian adapt its products and engineering practices.
“I’ve doubled down on wanting to bring in students from university. These students are extremely talented and fairly AI-native,” Rao said.
Published on August 30, 2026
