Staff Software Engineer, Query and Access Control

Reykjavík · 3+ years experience · Hybrid · Posted Oct 19, 2026

At a glance

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.
We believe in supporting people to do their best work and thrive. Our goal is to ensure that Asana upholds an environment where all people feel that they are respected and valued, whether they are applying for an open position or working at the company. We provide equal employment opportunities to all applicants without regard to race, color, religion, age, sex, national origin, disability status, genetics, protected veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, or any other characteristic protected by law.
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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.
The Query and Access Control team owns the query execution path over the Work Graph and the permissioning model that governs it.

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

8+ years of engineering experience building and operating reliable backend services at scale, with 3+ years driving large-scale projects
Driven large technical initiatives spanning multiple teams, and perhaps organizations, from early design to adoption
Go deep on hard problems and can carry a design from first principles through to production
Enjoy sharing what you know with other engineers and helping them build production-quality infrastructure
Skilled at communicating technical concepts and constraints to cross-functional partners in product
Bring care and rigor to systems where correctness is not negotiable, and can reason about the blast radius of a change before it ships

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