Senior Software Engineer, AI Teammates Platform San Francisco

Asana; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 202,000 - 230,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Mental health, wellness & fitness

Career coaching & support

Inclusive family building benefits

Long-term savings or retirement plans

In-office culinary options to cater to

Job summary

Asana, Inc. is seeking a Senior Software Engineer for the AI Teammates platform in San Francisco. You will drive architectural initiatives, design scalable agentic runtime systems, and shepherd projects from concept to production at scale, impacting millions of users.

You will lead end-to-end design and delivery across the execution engine, tool orchestration, and platform APIs, partnering with product, data science, and external model providers to push enterprise-ready AI capabilities forward.

Qualifications

• 6+ years building and running production distributed systems, microservices, or complex backend architectures.
• Tech Lead or AoR owner driving multi-contributor projects from ambiguity to delivery across teams.
• High ownership and accountability: outcomes are yours, you follow through and raise risks early.
• Product and customer-first: design with customer problem in mind, use data to shape direction.
• Bias for action: move fast, decide from customer feedback, data, and eval results.
• Strong design-doc skills and sound trade-off judgment (latency, cost, determinism).
• Hands-on experience or interest in LLMs, agentic patterns, eval pipelines, RAG, or real-time streaming.
• Quick learner who ramps fast on new domains and codebases.
• Passion for mentoring engineers with actionable code and design feedback.

Responsibilities

• Drive architectural initiatives and end-to-end delivery of projects across the AI Teammates execution engine, tool orchestration, and platform APIs & events.
• Architect and own composable platform foundations, harness, memory, and enable teams to build agentic capabilities self-serve.
• Design robust, extensible systems for agentic execution, prompt-driven automation, tool integrations, and enterprise-grade reliability.
• Solve complex problems in model evaluations, latency tuning, and cost optimization while balancing debt and risk.
• Ship in small increments, validate with real customer usage, evals, and data-driven adjustments.
• Anticipate risks early, break down visions into milestones and actionable tasks.
• Own outcomes from design through production, quality, and customer impact.
• Identify gaps, propose new features and platform re-architecture based on feedback.
• Champion technical excellence, write design docs, establish evaluation methods, mentor across levels.

Skills

Distributed systems

Microservices

Backend architectures

Tech Lead

Mentoring engineers

Customer-focused

LLMs / AI

RAG / eval pipelines

Code reviews

Tools

OpenAI

Anthropic

Platform APIs

Job description

AI Teammates are Asana’s flagship AI innovation - autonomous agents embedded directly into enterprise workflows that reason, act, and proactively drive work forward. The AI Agents/Teammates Platform (AITP) team owns the execution engine and platform layer that makes Asana's AI Teammates and other AI Agents effective, reliable, and scalable. We build the core systems behind agentic execution: model evaluation and rollouts, proactive detection of blocked work, execution quality infrastructure, tool orchestration, and the platform APIs, events, harness and agentic memory that power AI across all of Asana engineering. Rather than building a monolithic feature, we build a composable foundation. We’re looking for a Senior Software Engineer to drive key architectural initiatives, design performant agentic runtime systems, and help build a reliable foundation that scales to millions of users.

Location: San Francisco, office-centric hybrid (in office Monday, Tuesday, 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

• Drive the technical design, architecture, and end-to-end delivery of medium-to-large projects across the AI Teammates execution engine, tool orchestration, and platform APIs & events.
• Architect and own composable platform foundations, harness, memory, partnering with product engineering teams to enable them to build agentic capabilities into their domains in a self-serve manner.
• Design robust, extensible, and performant systems that support agentic execution, prompt-driven automation, tool integrations, and strict enterprise-grade reliability boundaries.
• Solve complex technical problems across model evaluations, latency tuning, and cost optimization while balancing technical debt, execution risk, and direct business goals.
• Move quickly by shipping in small increments, validating with real customer usage, evals, and metrics, and adjusting based on what the data shows rather than assumptions.
• Anticipate customer and architectural risks early, breaking down complex agentic product visions into clear engineering milestones and actionable tasks.
• Take end-to-end ownership of and accountability for outcomes, not just delivery, from design through production, quality, and customer impact.
• Proactively identify gaps and opportunities, then propose and drive new features, platform capabilities, and re-architecture, backed by customer feedback and usage data.
• Champion technical excellence, write high-leverage design docs, establish evaluation methodologies, and mentor engineers across levels to raise the engineering bar.
• Partner closely with Product Management, Design, Data Science, and external model providers (e.g., OpenAI, Anthropic) to define requirements and align technical direction.

About You

• 6+ years building and running production distributed systems, microservices, or complex backend architectures.
• A track record as Tech Lead or AoR owner, driving multi-contributor projects from ambiguity to delivery across teams and services.
• High ownership and accountability: outcomes are yours, you follow through, and you raise risks early and openly.
• Product and customer-first: you start from the customer problem, use feedback and data to shape direction, and bring ideas rather than waiting for specs. You understand how architecture and model behavior affect user trust, latency, and reliability.
• Bias for action grounded in reality: you move fast and decide from customer feedback, production data, and eval results, and you know when a decision needs more rigor and when it can be reversed cheaply.
• Strong design-doc skills and sound trade-off judgment (latency, cost, determinism, maintainability).
• Hands-on experience or deep interest in LLMs, agentic patterns, eval pipelines, RAG, or real-time streaming.
• A quick learner who ramps fast on new domains, codebases, and the AI landscape.
• A passion for guiding and mentoring engineers with actionable code and design feedback.

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 $202,000 - $230,000. 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, sales incentive pay (for most sales roles), and benefits. If you're interviewing for this role, speak with your Talent Acquisition Partner to learn more about the total compensation and benefits for this role.

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

These are just some of the benefits we offer, and benefits may vary based on role, country, and local regulations. If you're interviewing for this role, speak with your Talent Acquisition Partner to learn more about the total compensation and benefits for this role.

About us

Asana helps teams orchestrate their work, from small projects to strategic initiatives. Millions of teams around the world rely on Asana to achieve their most important goals, faster.