Senior Staff Engineer, AI
$297k - $350k • San Francisco
Posted 9d ago
Job Location
San Francisco
Tech Stack
Remote Work Policy
On-site
Categories
Applied AI Engineer
About the job
Asana's AI organization is building the platform and products that integrate AI into how teams work. This includes AI Teammates, an orchestration layer for agents, and the AI platform supporting all Asana AI features, covering model access, retrieval, context, evaluation, and production quality. We are seeking a Senior Staff Software Engineer to lead technical direction across this organization, tackling complex cross-team challenges, making critical architectural decisions, and shaping the future of AI within Asana's products. This role involves influencing strategy across multiple engineering teams located in San Francisco, New York, Vancouver, and Warsaw.
Responsibilities
- Define the technical vision and architecture for Asana's AI organization, including AI platform, Agent systems, and Studio, in partnership with engineering and product leadership.
- Partner with Product, Design, Data Science, Security, and Legal to transition ambitious AI products from prototype to reliable, trusted enterprise features.
- Lead strategic initiatives spanning multiple teams, such as agent runtime and orchestration, context and memory for agents grounded in the Work Graph, and reliable, cost-efficient LLM inference at enterprise scale.
- Set standards for measuring AI quality, including offline and online evaluation, production monitoring, and feedback loops for improving agents.
- Make and guide high-stakes technical decisions on model and vendor strategy, build versus buy, and shared platform abstractions, ensuring long-term viability.
- Influence R&D-wide AI strategy by providing a grounded perspective on the model and agent landscape to senior leadership.
- Mentor staff and senior engineers, develop tech leads across the AI organization, and elevate the bar for design and architecture reviews.
- Represent Asana's AI engineering work externally through talks, writing, and community engagement, and assist in attracting senior talent.
Requirements
- 10+ years of experience building production software, with significant experience as a technical lead spanning multiple teams.
- 3+ years building production systems with LLMs or machine learning, including agents, retrieval, evaluation, or inference infrastructure.
- Proven track record of leading architecture and initiatives across organizational boundaries with decisions that have proven effective over time.
- Hands-on fluency with the current AI landscape, including foundation models, agent frameworks, tool use, and evaluation methods, with the ability to set direction and adapt to new information.
- Deep experience with distributed systems, addressing reliability, latency, and cost challenges at scale.
- Clear communication skills across all levels, from engineering design reviews to executive strategy discussions, bridging product, business, and technical language.
- Passion for coaching and mentoring engineers, including senior and staff-level individuals.
- Experience with multi-tenant enterprise SaaS, and with security, privacy, and data governance for AI systems is a plus.
- Demonstrated curiosity about AI tools and emerging technologies, with a willingness to learn and leverage them.
Benefits
- Mental health, wellness & fitness benefits
- Career coaching & support
- Inclusive family building benefits
- Long-term savings or retirement plans
- In-office culinary options