The opportunity
We are looking for a Director of Engineering to lead our AI Platform organization. This group builds the foundational systems powering every AI experience across Asana.
What you'll do
Drive Strategy & Execution Across the AI Teammates Pillar: Lead the multi-year vision and technical strategy for Asana’s AI platform, covering retrieval and agent context, model serving and inference, model portfolio strategy, and evaluation systems.
Optimize AI Infrastructure Costs: Own cost-per-execution as a primary engineering metric, managing model selection, routing, open-weight versus frontier trade-offs, inference optimization, caching, and prompt efficiency to protect product margins at scale.
Establish AI Evaluation Frameworks: Establish evaluation frameworks, regression prevention, and performance standards that product teams can rely on out of the box, making quality, cost, and latency measurable defaults.
Lead and Mentor Teams: Lead and mentor managers and their teams across San Francisco and New York City, building autonomous owners, recruiting top talent, and maintaining high execution standards.
Manage Model Strategy: Evaluate when to adopt frontier models versus open-weight models and structure provider relationships to prevent vendor lock-in.
Architectural Leadership: Pressure-test architectural decisions, arbitrate build-versus-buy debates with data, and act as the trusted technical authority for AI infrastructure accuracy across the company.
What they're looking for
- Drive Cross-Functional Partnerships: Partner cross-functionally with product, go-to-market, and finance leaders to tie platform investments directly to business performance, unit margins, and enterprise trust.
- + years of software engineering experience with 5+ years of engineering: leadership, including 2+ years managing engineering managers. You've built organizations, not just teams: you've hired and developed managers, restructured when the mission changed, and held a bar for both.
- Proven track record of using AI tools daily, with deep expertise in serving: architectures, inference providers, agentic frameworks, RAG architectures, and scale evaluation systems.
- Proven experience optimizing infrastructure costs and unit economics at scale: with concrete metrics and clear trade-offs.
