Director of AI Platform Engineering

Asana; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 306,000 - 360,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Mental health benefits

Career coaching

Family building benefits

Retirement plans

Culinary options

Job summary

Asana seeks a Director of Engineering to lead the AI Platform organization, shaping multi-year strategy for retrieval, model serving, and evaluation systems across enterprise workflows. You’ll mentor managers across San Francisco and New York City, fostering autonomous ownership and high execution standards.

We offer an office-centric hybrid model with in‑office days and flexible WFH options. The base salary range of $306,000–$360,000 reflects market value and individual qualifications.

Qualifications

• 12+ years of software engineering experience with leadership experience including managing managers.
• Proven track record of using AI tools daily with expertise in serving architectures, inference providers, and evaluation systems.
• Proven experience optimizing infrastructure costs and unit economics at scale.
• Platform mindset: earning trust, clear standards, data-driven prioritization.
• Skilled asynchronous communicator with distributed teams across time zones.

Responsibilities

• Lead the AI Platform pillar by establishing multi-year vision and technical strategy for retrieval, model serving, and evaluation systems.
• Optimize AI infrastructure costs, manage model selection, routing, and prompt efficiency to protect margins at scale.
• Establish evaluation frameworks and performance standards that enable product teams to measure quality, cost, and latency.
• Lead and mentor managers across San Francisco and New York City to build autonomous ownership and high execution standards.
• Evaluate when to adopt frontier models vs open-weight models and manage provider relationships to avoid vendor lock-in.
• Provide architectural leadership and defend build-versus-buy decisions with data and technical authority.

Skills

AI Platform leadership

Inference architectures

RAG architectures

Strategy development

Cross-functional leadership

Cost optimization

Job description

Asana seeks a Director of Engineering to lead the AI Platform organization, shaping multi-year strategy for retrieval, model serving, and evaluation systems across enterprise workflows. You’ll mentor managers across San Francisco and New York City, fostering autonomous ownership and high execution standards.

We offer an office-centric hybrid model with in‑office days and flexible WFH options. The base salary range of $306,000–$360,000 reflects market value and individual qualifications.