Staff Software Engineer (Query and Access Control)

Location: Reykjavík, Iceland; office-centric hybrid schedule based in the Reykjavik office, with standard in-office days on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday. Most employees may work from home on Wednesdays; Friday work-from-home availability depends on the work and partner teams.

Base salary: 1,600,000–1,800,000 ISK monthly, plus potential equity, sales incentive pay where applicable, and benefits.

Company

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

What you will do

• Design and implement a query layer over the Work Graph that remains correct and performant as customer domains and permission structures grow.
• Evolve the access control model so permission checks remain sound, auditable, and fast on every read path.
• Define authorization for new caller classes, including AI agents acting on a user’s behalf, without weakening customer guarantees.
• Drive large, multi-quarter projects across teams from design and implementation through deployment and iteration.
• Build alignment with engineers and product leaders, and contribute through design reviews, code reviews, mentorship, and infrastructure partnerships.
• Support framework and product engineers in building new product functionality at scale.

Requirements

• 8+ years of engineering experience building and operating reliable backend services at scale, including 3+ years driving large-scale projects.
• Experience driving large technical initiatives across multiple teams or organizations from early design through adoption.
• Ability to deeply analyze difficult problems and carry designs from first principles through production.
• Interest in sharing knowledge and helping engineers build production-quality infrastructure.
• Strong communication of technical concepts and constraints to cross-functional product partners.
• Care and rigor when working on systems where correctness is critical, including the ability to assess the blast radius of changes before release.

Nice to have

• Experience with authorization systems, permission models, or multi-tenant data isolation at scale.
• Experience with query engines, query planning, caching layers, or graph-shaped data access.
• Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code and container orchestration technologies such as Terraform and Kubernetes.

Culture & Benefits

• Office-centric hybrid work model with role- and country-dependent flexibility.
• Mental health, wellness, and fitness benefits.
• Career coaching and support.
• Inclusive family-building benefits and long-term savings or retirement plans.
• In-office culinary options supporting dietary preferences.
• Inclusive workplace focused on varied backgrounds, perspectives, and skills.