Tech Lead, Platform Reliability Engineering at Asana

We're looking for a Tech Lead to own technical direction for Asana's Platform Reliability Engineering team. This role is for someone who thrives as a technical leader without needing to take on people management. At Asana, Tech Leads own technical execution, architecture, and long-term engineering strategy. You'll lead complex projects, make key technical decisions, and set the standard for engineering quality. You'll guide ICs through technical design and project leadership, and partner with teams across the company. An Engineering Manager handles people leadership – you own the technical direction. Your team will build core platform systems like load shedding, rate limiting, circuit breakers, and traffic controls that protect Asana under real-world load. This is hands-on work – you'll spend significant time designing and building systems alongside the team, while partnering with other platform teams to make reliability something that's built in, not bolted on. Our tech stack includes: AWS, Kubernetes (EKS), MySQL (RDS), OpenSearch, DynamoDB, Redis, Terraform, Datadog, TypeScript, Scala, Go, and Python. (Yeah, we know this sounds like buzzword bingo – but we want this post to actually show up in your searches.) We're especially interested in people who think like backend engineers but obsess over failure modes, capacity planning, and building systems that degrade gracefully under pressure. This role is based in our Warsaw office with an office-centric hybrid schedule – in-office days are Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday. We offer a Contract of Employment (UoP) for our employees in Poland. What You'll Achieve: • Set technical direction for the team, making sure we're solving the right problems in the right way. • Design and build core platform systems – load shedding, circuit breakers, rate limiting – that protect Asana at scale. • Own critical platform concerns like ingress and egress, shaping how traffic flows through our systems. • Define stable interfaces and libraries that other platform teams build on. • Lead end-to-end projects, from scoping and design through to rollout, working across multiple platform teams. • Raise the bar for technical quality through code reviews, design discussions, and technical mentorship. • Partner with other infrastructure teams to embed reliability into Asana's architecture – not as an afterthought, but as a core design constraint. • Debug hard problems across the stack. When something breaks in a way that matters, you'll be the person who figures out why and makes sure it doesn't happen again. About You: • Strong software engineering background – you're comfortable writing production code and designing systems. We use Go, Python, Scala, and TypeScript, but we care more about engineering fundamentals than specific language experience. • 8+ years of experience building and operating backend systems at scale. • Experience leading technical projects and influencing direction across teams. • You make others around you better – through clarity, feedback, and raising technical standards – even without formal authority. • Familiarity with distributed systems patterns – you've thought about things like backpressure, graceful degradation, and capacity planning. • Experience with major cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure), Terraform, and monitoring tooling like Datadog or similar. • Experience defining and working within explicit reliability and performance targets for production systems. • Clear communicator and strong collaborator – you're comfortable navigating trade-offs with other platform and infrastructure teams. • Demonstrates curiosity about AI tools and emerging technologies, with a willingness to learn and leverage them to enhance productivity, collaboration, or decision-making Important: This is a software engineering role. If your background is primarily scripting, dashboards, or operational playbooks, this likely isn't a fit. Why this role? • Reliability as a first-class feature: You won't be patching things up after the fact. You'll build the systems that make Asana resilient by design. • Foundational work: Load shedding, traffic management, ingress/egress – these are the building blocks that protect everything else. You'll own the technical direction for all of it. • Technical leadership without management overhead: You'll shape architecture and raise the bar for quality, while an Engineering Manager handles people leadership. • Strong collaboration, reasonable hours: You'll work closely with infrastructure teams in Warsaw and Reykjavik, making deep collaboration practical without constant timezone gymnastics. • Room to grow: As the team's scope expands, so will yours – whether that's deeper technical ownership, broader architectural influence, or mentoring the next generation of engineers. In this role, success means shipping systems that other teams rely on by default – because they make the platform safer, not because they're mandatory. What we offer • Generous, transparent and fair compensation system (base salary and generous Restricted Stock Unit for Asana Inc.) • Contract of Employment (with 50% tax deductible costs for author’s rights usage for Engineers) • Health insurance with dental and travel coverage (Lux Med) • Lunch catering on the days that you work from the office • Career growth budget • Home office setup budget • Gym/Fitness card • Fertility healthcare and family-forming support with Carrot • Mental health support in Modern Health • Group life insurance • Holiday allowance • MacBooks with all necessary accessories For this role, the estimated base salary range is between 29k - 32,917 PLN gross monthly on the contract of employment (UoP). The actual base salary will vary based on various factors and individual qualifications objectively assessed during the interview process. The listed range above is a guideline, and the base compensation range for this role may be modified. Our total compensation consists of base salary and equity (RSUs). #LI-Hybrid #LI-KM2 About us Asana is a leading platform for human + AI collaboration. Millions of teams around the world rely on Asana to achieve their most important goals, faster. Asana has been named to Fortune's Best Workplaces for 7+ years and recognized by Fast Company, Forbes, and Gartner for excellence in workplace culture and innovation. We offer an exceptional office-centric culture while adopting the best elements of hybrid models to ensure that every one of our global team members can work together effortlessly. With 13+ offices all over the world, we are always looking for individuals who care about building technology that drives positive change in the world and a culture where everyone feels that they belong. Join Asana’s Talent Network to stay up to date on job opportunities and life at Asana.