Staff Software Engineer, Query and Access Control

We're looking for a staff software engineer to work on how data is queried and who is allowed to see it. Every read in Asana passes through this layer: it resolves what a user is asking for and enforces, on every object, whether that user is permitted to see it. You will help us keep those guarantees correct and fast as our largest customers grow their domains, their permission structures get more intricate, and AI agents become a significant new class of caller. The Query and Access Control team owns the query execution path over the Work Graph and the permissioning model that governs it. As a staff engineer on the team, you will take on our hardest technical problems and drive the work that spans several teams, bringing depth to the design decisions that shape this layer for years. We work closely with other teams in the core infrastructure area to build and retain customer trust in Asana as the platform for their critical workflows. This role is based in our Reykjavik office with an office-centric hybrid schedule. The standard in-office days are Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday. Most Asanas have the option to work from home on Wednesdays. Working from home on Fridays depends on the type of work you do and the teams with which you partner. If you're interviewing for this role, your recruiter will share more about the in-office requirements. What you'll achieve Design and implement a query layer over the Work Graph that stays correct and performant as customer domains and permission structures grow Evolve our access control model so that permission checks remain sound, auditable, and fast on every read path Define how new classes of caller, including AI agents acting on a user's behalf, are authorized, without weakening the guarantees customers depend on Drive large, multi-quarter projects that cut across team boundaries, from design and implementation through deployment and iteration Build alignment on the design with engineers and leaders in other teams before the code is written, and keep that alignment as the work lands Share what you know through design review, code review, and mentorship Partner with infrastructure teams across Asana to define how user data in the Work Graph is accessed Support framework and product engineers to build new product functionality at scale, quickly About you 8+ years of engineering experience building and operating reliable backend services at scale, with 3+ years driving large-scale projects You have driven large technical initiatives spanning multiple teams, and perhaps organizations, from early design to adoption You go deep on hard problems and can carry a design from first principles through to production You enjoy sharing what you know with other engineers and helping them build production-quality infrastructure You are skilled at communicating technical concepts and constraints to cross-functional partners in product You bring care and rigor to systems where correctness is not negotiable, and can reason about the blast radius of a change before it ships Desirable You have experience with authorization systems, permission models, or multi-tenant data isolation at scale You have worked on query engines, query planning, caching layers, or graph-shaped data access You are familiar with infrastructure-as-code and container orchestration technologies like Terraform and Kubernetes At Asana, we're committed to building teams that include a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and skills, as this is critical to helping us achieve our mission. If you're interested in this role and don't meet every listed requirement, we still encourage you to apply. What we’ll offer Our comprehensive compensation package plays a big part in how we recognize you for the impact you have on our path to achieving our mission. We believe that compensation should be reflective of the value you create relative to the market value of your role. To ensure