Principal Software Engineer, Asana Platform

Asana•New York City, NY

3d•Hybrid

About The Position

The Platform organization at Asana builds the services and shared experiences that every Asana product runs on. This includes the Work Graph, where customer data resides, and the APIs that enable actions on it. It also encompasses event and reporting systems, an extensibility layer for integrations and AI agents, and new shared experiences for all Asana customers. This role serves as the senior technical leader for this organization, owning the architecture that Asana's products and customers build upon, and driving initiatives that are too large or risky for individual teams. The Principal Software Engineer will collaborate with senior leadership to align engineering plans with business outcomes and shape the future direction of the platform.

Requirements

12+ years building production software, including years spent setting technical direction across a large organization or several.
Have built platforms that other teams ship on, at a scale where mistakes are expensive, and 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.
Have led at least one major replatforming or migration in a system that could not stop serving customers while it changed.
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.
Have grown staff and senior staff engineers into larger scopes, and senior people seek you out to work with you.

Nice To Haves

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 everyone can bring their full selves to work and thrive.
Demonstrates curiosity about AI tools and emerging technologies, with a willingness to learn and leverage them to enhance productivity, collaboration, or decision-making.

Responsibilities

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 high-stakes calls on build versus buy, on vendors, and on how to replatform without stopping product delivery, ensuring these 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.