Senior Engineering Manager, Agent Context New York City

Asana; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 264,000 - 300,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Mental health benefits

Career coaching

Inclusive family building benefits

Long-term savings or retirement plans

In-office dining options

Job summary

Asana in New York is seeking an Engineering Manager to lead the Agent Context team, shaping how Asana's AI search, retrieval, and reasoning over the work graph operate at enterprise scale.

You will build a high‑performing NYC-based team, collaborate with San Francisco and Warsaw partners, and work with a product manager to turn a long‑term platform thesis into a concrete roadmap, with a strong focus on reliability and cost efficiency.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience with 3+ years managing engineers.
• Experience shipping production search, retrieval, or ML-serving systems at meaningful scale.
• Deep working knowledge of the modern retrieval stack including inverted indexes, vector search, and embedding models.
• Experience building/evaluating ML/AI quality metrics and online experimentation.
• Ability to review designs and provide sharp, actionable feedback.
• Clear written communication across time zones and teams.
• Experience with LLM-powered products or agent systems is a plus.

Responsibilities

• Own the technical direction and delivery of Asana's retrieval stack end to end.
• Build and operate the evaluation infrastructure for recall/precision benchmarks, offline and online evals.
• Manage cost, latency, and quality tradeoffs across retrieval components.
• Define ownership and rollout guidance for embedding decisions and platform integration.
• Hire, grow, and mentor a NYC-based senior engineering team across three time zones.
• Collaborate with the PM to translate a multi-year platform thesis into a sequenced roadmap.

Skills

Software engineering

Team leadership

Distributed teams management

Retrieval systems

ML serving systems

Tools

OpenSearch

Embedding pipelines

Job description

We're looking for an Engineering Manager to lead the Agent Context team in NYC. This team owns how Asana's AI systems search, retrieve, and reason over the work graph the search infrastructure, dense embedding pipelines, ranking systems, and evaluation frameworks that determine whether every AI experience at Asana is trustworthy or not. Your mission is to make retrieval comprehensive, reliable, and fast at enterprise scale, positioning Asana as the coordination and memory layer for the agentic enterprise.

This is a high-leverage platform role: nearly every AI product at Asana - AI Teammates, chat experiences, agentic workflows depends on the systems this team builds. You will manage a team of senior engineers in New York collaborating daily with partner teams in San Francisco and Warsaw, and work alongside a dedicated Product Manager as your direct counterpart. 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.

What you'll achieve

• Own the technical direction and delivery of Asana's retrieval stack end to end: lexical and semantic search, dense embedding generation and backfill at scale, chunking and ranking strategies, and RAG comprehensiveness across the work graph.
• Build and operate the evaluation infrastructure that makes retrieval quality measurable recall/precision benchmarks, offline and online evals, and comparative testing across retrieval backends - so quality decisions are made with data, not vibes.
• Drive the cost, performance, and quality tradeoffs that define this space: when semantic search earns its infrastructure cost over lexical, how to hit latency targets without sacrificing recall, and how retrieval improvements compound into cheaper, faster downstream LLM calls.
• Set and enforce the bar for how other teams at Asana integrate with retrieval: clear ownership of embedding decisions, rollout guidance, metrics to watch, and a platform posture that says no to unjustified infrastructure spend.
• Hire, grow, and retain a team of strong senior engineers in NYC, and lead effectively across three time zones with deliberate async communication practices.
• Partner with your PM counterpart to translate a multi-year platform thesis into a sequenced roadmap, and represent the team's technical strategy to engineering and product leadership.

About you

• 8+ years of software engineering experience with 3+ years managing engineers, including senior engineers, on infrastructure or ML systems teams. You've hired, coached, grown, and when necessary exited engineers and your former reports would work for you again.
• You have shipped and operated production search, retrieval, or ML-serving systems at meaningful scale. You can speak concretely about systems you've run: the index architecture, the embedding models, the latency budgets, the incidents, and what you'd do differently.
• Deep working knowledge of the modern retrieval stack inverted indexes and BM25, vector search and embedding models, hybrid retrieval, chunking strategies, re-ranking and strong opinions about when each is worth its cost. You should be able to argue both sides of "semantic search everywhere" and tell us where you actually land.
• You've built or heavily used evaluation systems for ML/AI quality: golden datasets, recall/precision metrics, LLM-as-judge, online experimentation. You believe unmeasured quality claims are noise.
• You're technically credible enough to review a design doc for an embedding backfill or an OpenSearch mapping change and catch the problem the team missed. You don't need to write the code, but engineers should leave design reviews with you sharper than they arrived.
• You've led distributed teams across time zones and know that it runs on written communication. You write clearly, decisively, and often.
• Experience with LLM-powered products, agent systems, or RAG pipelines in production is strongly preferred. Experience scaling a platform team that serves internal customers is a plus.

What we'll offer

Our comprehensive compensation package plays a big part in how we recognize you for the impact you have on our path to achieving our mission. We believe that compensation should be reflective of the value you create relative to the market value of your role. To ensure pay is fair and not impacted by biases, we're committed to looking at market value which is why we check ourselves and conduct a yearly pay equity audit.

For this role, the estimated base salary range is between$264,000 - $300,000. The actual base salary will vary based on various factors, including market and individual qualifications objectively assessed during the interview process. The listed range above is a guideline, and the base salary range for this role may be modified.

In addition to base salary, your compensation package may include additional components such as equity and benefits. We strive to provide equitable and competitive benefits packages that support our employees worldwide and include:

• Mental health, wellness & fitness benefits
• Career coaching & support
• Inclusive family building benefits
• Long-term savings or retirement plans
• In-office culinary options to cater to your dietary preferences

#LI-Hybrid

About us

Asana is a leading platform for human + AI collaboration. Millions of teams around the world rely on Asana to achieve their most important goals, faster. Asana has been named to Fortune's Best Workplaces for 7+ years and recognized by Fast Company, Forbes, and Gartner for excellence in workplace culture and innovation. We offer an exceptional office-centric culture while adopting the best elements of hybrid models to ensure that every one of our global team members can work together effortlessly. With 13+ offices all over the world, we are always looking for individuals who care about building technology that drives positive change in the world and a culture where everyone feels that they belong.

Join Asana’s Talent Networkto stay up to date on job opportunities and life at Asana.