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Salary: ISK 1,600,000 - 1,800,000 / monthly
Asana is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead the design and evolution of the Query and Access Control layer—a critical infrastructure component that handles every read operation in the platform. This role sits at the intersection of performance, security, and scale, responsible for ensuring that data access remains correct, fast, and auditable as customer domains grow and new classes of callers (including AI agents) emerge.
You will own the query execution path over the Work Graph and the permissioning model that governs it. Your responsibilities include:
- Designing and implementing a query layer that maintains correctness and performance as customer domains and permission structures scale
- Evolving the access control model to ensure permission checks remain sound, auditable, and fast on every read path
- Defining authorization patterns for new caller types, including AI agents acting on behalf of users, without compromising security guarantees
- Driving large, multi-quarter technical initiatives that span team boundaries, from design through deployment and iteration
- Building alignment with engineers and leaders across teams before code is written, and maintaining that alignment as work ships
- Mentoring other engineers through design review, code review, and direct guidance
- Partnering with infrastructure teams to define how user data in the Work Graph is accessed
- Supporting framework and product engineers to build new functionality at scale
This is an office-centric hybrid role based in Reykjavík. Standard in-office days are Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday. Most team members have the option to work from home on Wednesdays, with Friday flexibility depending on team needs.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 8+ years of engineering experience building and operating reliable backend services at scale
- 3+ years driving large-scale projects spanning multiple teams or organizations, from early design through adoption
- Demonstrated ability to go deep on hard problems and carry designs from first principles to production
- Strong communication skills for explaining technical concepts and constraints to cross-functional partners
- Rigor and care in systems where correctness is non-negotiable; ability to reason about blast radius before shipping changes
- Proven track record of sharing knowledge and helping other engineers build production-quality infrastructure
DESIRABLE:
- Experience with authorization systems, permission models, or multi-tenant data isolation at scale
- Background in query engines, query planning, caching layers, or graph-shaped data access
- Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code and container orchestration (Terraform, Kubernetes)
