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Salary: USD 365,500 - 380,000 / annual
Asana is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to serve as the senior technical leader of the Platform organization. This role owns the architecture that Asana's products and customers build on, including the Work Graph, APIs, events and reporting systems, extensibility layers, and shared experiences used across all Asana products.
You will set technical direction across the platform from the Work Graph and its data model to the ecosystem of APIs and shared experiences that products, integrations, and AI agents build on. You will partner across R&D, Security, and Legal to drive a portfolio of high-stakes, long-term initiatives that create leverage in how the company builds. Key responsibilities include setting the bar for good platform design (interface design, separation of concerns, reliability and functional guarantees), making high-stakes decisions on build versus buy and vendor selection, and guiding replatforming efforts without stopping product delivery.
You will serve as the decision maker and backstop when technical questions cut across pillars, turning cross-org disagreement into committed decisions. You will grow technical leaders around you, from mentoring staff and senior staff engineers to creating scopes they can own outright. You will also represent Asana's platform engineering externally through talks and writing, and help bring senior engineers into the organization.
You will work with Asana's most senior leaders to connect engineering plans to business outcomes and shape where the platform takes the company next, with particular focus on how AI agents change what a work platform must offer.
The role is based in the New York office with an office-centric hybrid schedule. Standard in-office days are Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday. Most employees have the option to work from home on Wednesdays, with Friday flexibility depending on work type and team partnerships.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 12+ years building production software, including years spent setting technical direction across a large organization or several
- Experience building platforms that other teams ship on, at a scale where mistakes are expensive, with architectural decisions that proved right over years rather than quarters
- Deep experience with distributed systems and large, shared data models, including performance and reliability work for enterprise customers
- Clear view of where AI is taking platforms, including agents as first-class actors and governance enterprises demand when agents touch their work
- Led at least one major replatforming or migration in a system that could not stop serving customers while it changed
- Ability to communicate at every level of a company, from design reviews with engineers to strategy discussions with executives, translating between technical and business language
- Experience growing staff and senior staff engineers into larger scopes; senior people seek you out to work with you
- Deep care for collaboration and ability to foster an inclusive culture
- Demonstrates curiosity about AI tools and emerging technologies, with willingness to learn and leverage them
- Plus: experience with multi-tenant enterprise SaaS, and with security and data governance for AI systems
