Principal Software Engineer, Asana Platform

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About the role

The Platform organization at Asana builds the services and shared experiences that every Asana product runs on. That starts with the Work Graph, where our customers' work lives, and the APIs that let people and AI agents act on it. It extends to the events and reporting systems built on the graph, to the extensibility layer that connects Asana to the tools and agents our customers use, and to new shared experiences that are used by all Asana’s customers. We are looking for a Principal Software Engineer to be the senior technical leader of this organization. You will own the architecture that Asana's products and customers build on, and drive the initiatives too large or too risky for any one team to carry. 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. This role is based in our New York office with an office-centric hybrid schedule. The standard in-office days are Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday. Most Asanas have the option to work from home on Wednesdays. Working from home on Fridays depends on the type of work you do and the teams with which you partner. If you're interviewing for this role, your recruiter will share more about the in-office requirements. What you'll achieve • Set technical direction across Asana's platform, from the Work Graph and its data model to the ecosystem of APIs and shared experiences that products, integrations, and agents build on • Partner across the R&D organization, Security, and Legal to drive a portfolio of high-stakes, long-term initiatives that create leverage in how we build • Set the bar for good platform design, including interface design, separation of concerns, and reliability and functional guarantees • Make the high-stakes calls on build versus buy, on vendors, and on how to replatform without stopping product delivery, and make sure those decisions age well • Bring a grounded view of the industry, and of how AI agents change what a work platform has to offer, into R&D strategy with Asana's senior leadership • Serve as the decision maker and backstop when a technical question cuts across pillars, and turn cross-org disagreement into a call people commit to • Grow the technical leaders around you, from mentoring staff and senior staff engineers to creating scopes they can own outright • Represent Asana's platform engineering externally through talks and writing, and bring senior engineers in the door About you • 12+ years building production software, including years spent setting technical direction across a large organization or several • You have built platforms that other teams ship on, at a scale where mistakes are expensive, and your architectural decisions have proved right over years rather than quarters • Deep experience with distributed systems and with large, shared data models, including the performance and reliability work of running them for enterprise customers • A clear view of where AI is taking platforms like ours, including agents as first-class actors and the governance enterprises demand when agents touch their work • You have led at least one major replatforming or migration in a system that could not stop serving customers while it changed • You communicate at every level of a company, from a design review with engineers to a strategy discussion with executives, and translate between technical and business language in both directions • You have grown staff and senior staff engineers into larger scopes, and senior people seek you out to work with you • Experience with multi-tenant enterprise SaaS, and with security and data governance for AI systems, is a plus • Deep care for collaboration and an ability to foster an inclusive culture where every

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