Staff Software Engineer (Distributed Systems)

Location: San Francisco, California, United States; office-centric hybrid schedule with in-office days on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday, work from home generally available on Wednesday, and Friday depending on the work

Base salary: $248,000–$282,000 per year, plus potential equity, sales incentive pay where applicable, and benefits

Company

Asana provides a human and AI collaboration platform used by millions of teams worldwide, including LunaDb, its core reactive data loading platform.

What you will do

• Define and execute a technical roadmap for scalability, reliability, developer productivity, and operational simplicity.
• Design, build, and operate highly available distributed services, caching layers, and realtime data pipelines processing millions of events per second.
• Improve query performance, cache invalidation, workload isolation, resource efficiency, and data correctness.
• Partner with product engineering teams to support new platform capabilities and simplify complex data access.
• Lead architecture, implementation, migration, rollout, and long-term production operations for major initiatives.
• Mentor engineers, guide cross-team architecture, participate in on-call rotations, and lead incident investigations and reliability improvements.

Requirements

• 7+ years of software engineering experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed backend services.
• 2+ years of experience building and scaling high-throughput data pipelines, relational or non-relational data stores, and realtime streaming systems.
• Proven experience operating mission-critical production systems and maintaining high reliability standards.
• Demonstrated technical leadership in setting architectural direction, driving cross-team consensus, and mentoring senior engineers.
• Deep architectural judgment and the ability to clearly explain trade-offs to engineering and cross-functional partners.
• Practical expertise with Kubernetes, distributed caching technologies such as Redis, and cloud-native infrastructure design.
• Curiosity about AI tools and emerging technologies, with willingness to learn and use them to improve productivity, collaboration, or decision-making.

Culture & Benefits

• Office-centric culture using a hybrid work model.
• Mental health, wellness, and fitness benefits.
• Career coaching and support.
• Inclusive family-building benefits.
• Long-term savings or retirement plans.
• In-office culinary options and benefits that may vary by role, country, and local regulations.