Principal Software Engineer (AI Platform)

Location: New York office, United States; office-centric hybrid schedule with in-office days on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday. Most employees may work from home on Wednesdays; Friday flexibility depends on the work and partner teams.

Base salary: $365,500–$380,000 per year, plus potential equity, incentive pay, and benefits.

Company

Asana provides a platform for human and AI collaboration used by millions of teams worldwide.

What you will do

• Set technical direction for the Work Graph, shared data model, APIs, events, reporting systems, extensibility layer, and shared product experiences.
• Lead high-stakes, long-term platform initiatives across R&D, Security, and Legal.
• Define platform design standards covering interfaces, separation of concerns, reliability, and functional guarantees.
• Make build-versus-buy, vendor, replatforming, and migration decisions while maintaining product delivery.
• Shape R&D strategy around AI agents, enterprise governance, and the future of work platforms.
• Resolve cross-organization technical decisions, mentor senior technical leaders, and represent platform engineering externally.

Requirements

• 12+ years of experience building production software and setting technical direction across large organizations.
• Experience building platforms used by other engineering teams at scale, with long-term architectural impact.
• Deep expertise in distributed systems, large shared data models, performance, and enterprise reliability.
• Experience leading a major replatforming or migration while continuing to serve customers.
• Ability to communicate with engineers and executives and translate between technical and business priorities.
• Experience developing staff and senior staff engineers into broader technical leadership roles.

Nice to have

• Experience with multi-tenant enterprise SaaS.
• Experience with security and data governance for AI systems.
• Curiosity about AI tools and emerging technologies.

Culture & Benefits

• Inclusive culture focused on collaboration, belonging, and varied backgrounds and perspectives.
• Mental health, wellness, and fitness benefits.
• Career coaching and support.
• Inclusive family-building benefits.
• Long-term savings or retirement plans and in-office culinary options.