Senior Engineering Manager, Agent Context
AsanaNew York City, New York, United States · Posted 1 month agoDescription
We're looking for an Engineering Manager to lead the Agent Context team in NYC. This team owns how Asana's AI systems search, retrieve, and reason over the work graph the search infrastructure, dense embedding pipelines, ranking systems, and evaluation frameworks that determine whether every AI experience at Asana is trustworthy or not. Your mission is to make retrieval comprehensive, reliable, and fast at enterprise scale, positioning Asana as the coordination and memory layer for the agentic enterprise.
This is a high-leverage platform role: nearly every AI product at Asana - AI Teammates, chat experiences, agentic workflows depends on the systems this team builds. You will manage a team of senior engineers in New York collaborating daily with partner teams in San Francisco and Warsaw, and work alongside a dedicated Product Manager as your direct counterpart. This role is based in our New York 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.
What you'll achieve
- Own the technical direction and delivery of Asana's retrieval stack end to end: lexical and semantic search, dense embedding generation and backfill at scale, chunking and ranking strategies, and RAG comprehensiveness across the work graph.
- Build and operate the evaluation infrastructure that makes retrieval quality measurable recall/precision benchmarks, offline and online evals, and comparative testing across retrieval backends - so quality decisions are made with data, not vibes.
- Drive the cost, performance, and quality tradeoffs that define this space: when semantic search earns its infrastructure cost over lexical, how to hit latency targets without sacrificing recall, and how retrieval improvements compound into cheaper, faster downstream LLM calls.
- Set and enforce the bar for how other teams at Asana integrate with retrieval: clear ownership of embedding decisions, rollout guidance, metrics to watch, and a platform posture that says no to unjustified infrastructure spend.
- Hire, grow, and retain a team of strong senior engineers in NYC, and lead effectively across three time zones with deliberate async communication practices.
- Partner with your PM counterpart to translate a multi-year platform thesis into a sequenced roadmap, and represent the team's technical strategy to engineering and product leadership.
About you
- 8+ years of software engineering experience with 3+ years managing engineers, including senior engineers, on infrastructure or ML systems teams. You've hired, coached, grown, and when necessary exited engineers and your former reports would work for you again.
- You have shipped and operated production search, retrieval, or ML-serving systems at meaningful scale. You can speak concretely about systems you've run: the index architecture, the embedding models, the latency budgets, the incidents, and what you'd do differently.
- Deep working knowledge of the modern retrieval stack inverted indexes and BM25, vector search and embedding models, hybrid retrieval, chunking strategies, re-ranking and strong opinions about when each is worth its cost. You should be able to argue both sides of "semantic search everywhere" and tell us where you actually land.
- You've built or heavily used evaluation systems for ML/AI quality: golden datasets, recall/precision metrics, LLM-as-judge, online experimentation. You believe unmeasured quality claims are noise.
- You're technically credible enough to review a design doc for an embedding backfill or an OpenSearch mapping change and catch the problem the team missed. You don't need to write the code, but engineers should leave design reviews with you sharper than they arrived.
- You've led distributed teams across time zones and know that it runs on written communication. You write clearly, decisively, and often.
- Experience with LLM-powered products, agent systems, or RAG pipelines in production is strongly preferred. Experience scaling a platform team that serves internal customers is a plus.
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 pay is fair and not impacted by biases, we're committed to looking at market value which is why we check ourselves and conduct a yearly pay equity audit.
For this role, the estimated base salary range is between $264,000 - $300,000. The actual base salary will vary based on various factors, including market and individual qualifications objectively assessed during the interview process. The listed range above is a guideline, and the base salary range for this role may be modified.
In addition to base salary, your compensation package may include additional components such as equity and benefits. We strive to provide equitable and competitive benefits packages that support our employees worldwide and include:
- Mental health, wellness & fitness benefits
- Career coaching & support
- Inclusive family building benefits
- Long-term savings or retirement plans
- In-office culinary options to cater to your dietary preferences
#LI-Hybrid
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.
Similar jobs
Est. 333,000 USD
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. In this role, you will lead four key teams through…
Est. 333,000 USD
We’re looking for an experienced engineering leader to lead and scale Asana’s flagship AI Teammates Pillar within our Core/AI Organization. Reporting directly to the Head of Engineering, AI & AWM, you will oversee an…
Est. 212,500 USD
The AI Retrieval team powers the intelligence behind Asana's AI features by finding relevant work graph content and delivering it to LLM context windows. Our work enables AI features that truly understand your work—both…
We're building AI Teammates: agents that work like actual users in Asana and integrated apps. They triage bugs, respond to requests, draft project briefs, conduct research, and handle complex knowledge work across your t…
Est. 216,000 USD
We’re looking for a visionary Product Manager to lead the Agents Experience team in San Francisco. In this role, you will define how humans and AI agents work together inside Asana and make collaborating with agents feel…
Est. 265,000 USD
We’re looking for a Staff Software Engineer to integrate and improve our AI developer experience so that engineers at Asana can use AI to increase their velocity. As part of the AI Developer Productivity team, you’ll set…
Est. 216,000 USD
We're looking for a Senior Software Engineer to integrate and improve our AI developer experience so that engineers at Asana can use AI to increase their velocity. As part of the AI Developer Productivity team, you'll bu…
Est. 180,500 USD
We're looking for a Software Engineer to integrate and improve our AI developer experience so that engineers at Asana can use AI to increase their velocity. As part of the AI Developer Productivity team, you'll build the…
Est. 212,500 USD
The Product team builds full-stack features end-to-end. From designing our data models to implementing the subtle interaction behaviors that differentiate good software from great software. We work closely with UI design…
Est. 165,000 EUR
As a Senior Solutions Architect inside the Solutions Center of Excellence, you will serve as a strategic, technical partner in our most complex enterprise sales cycles. You are a recognized subject matter expert who empo…
Est. 225,000 USD
The Asana Marketing team is responsible for fueling business growth and building a brand customers love. We create campaigns and content to attract new accounts and inspire current ones to grow with us. We continue to gr…
At Asana, we believe AI represents the future of work, and APIs are at the heart of how AI connects with the tools where work happens. Asana’s API team owns the gateways that enable data flow into and out of Asana, wheth…
Est. 225,000 USD
The Asana Marketing team is responsible for fueling business growth and building a brand customers love. We create campaigns and content to attract new accounts and inspire current ones to grow with us. We continue to gr…
Est. 175,750 USD
The Product team builds full-stack features end-to-end. From designing our data models to implementing the subtle interaction behaviors that differentiate good software from great software. We work closely with UI design…
Est. 167,650 USD
As a member of the AMER Solutions Org, you will act as a trusted advisor for prospects and clients, driving customer acquisition and accelerating revenue growth through a mastery of strategic sales and Asana platform exp…
Est. 207,000 USD
The IT Systems Engineering team builds the systems and processes that keep Asana running: endpoint management, identity, and the enterprise applications every Asana employee uses every day. As Manager of IT Applications…
Est. 228,800 USD
At Asana, we’re building agentic work management software to help every organization in the world become more effective in working together and realizing their goals. Our Customer Experience team is committed to helping…
Est. 206,500 USD
Asana is looking for a strategic, supportive, and business-savvy leader to manage our global Administrative Business Partner (ABP) community. This is more than a traditional operations role; it is a people-first leadersh…
Est. 310,000 USD
Asana’s Vertical Go to Market team is looking for a driven, entrepreneurial, customer-centric, and impact-oriented enterprise sales professional who holds themselves accountable to achieving results. You will join a dedi…
Est. 367,500 USD
We are looking for a world-class Strategic Enterprise Account Executive to fully own and elevate our relationship with Amazon, one of Asana's largest and most strategic customers globally. In this highly visible role, yo…
Est. 237,000 USD
Head of Global SEO/AEO We’re looking for a data-driven Head of Global SEO/AEO to own our worldwide organic growth strategy and execution. In this role, you will scale SEO and Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) into high-pe…
Est. 173,075 USD
Command by Asana is a new product purpose-built for software development teams that helps engineers stay in flow Command automatically catalogs the decisions, context, and next steps agents need to stay efficient and kee…
We're hiring a Senior Technical Program Manager to lead Asana's push into agentic work management — building the programs that let AI teammates plan, execute, and orchestrate work alongside humans. You'll drive initiativ…
Est. 225,000 USD
Asana Marketing is hiring a Principal Product Marketing Manager to own the GTM strategy for our new product, Command by Asana. This strategic, high-growth role is focused on rapidly scaling products from initial traction…
Est. 225,000 USD
Asana Marketing is hiring a Product Marketing Director to own the GTM strategy for our new product, Command by Asana. This strategic, high-growth role is focused on rapidly scaling products from initial traction to mass…
Est. 187,500 USD
The People Team at Asana works to enable all Asanas to achieve our goals as a company in a way that is consistent with our values. We focus on recruiting, developing, and retaining exceptional talent from diverse backgro…
Est. 112,000 EUR
We're looking for a senior technical consultant who thrives across the full arc of a complex technical engagement, from pre-sales scoping and architecture through hands-on delivery and handoff. As the sole Technical Serv…
Est. 290,000 USD
As the Head of Engineering Operations, you will be a key leadership partner to the CTO and the engineering leadership team, owning the operational backbone of our global R&D organization. In this role, you will serve…
Est. 216,000 USD
We’re looking for a Senior Product Manager to lead AI Studio, Asana's AI workflow builder, in San Francisco. The Product Management team drives Asana’s product strategy and execution, translating customer needs and oppor…
Est. 583,200 PLN
The AI Retrieval team powers the intelligence behind Asana's AI features by finding relevant work graph content and delivering it to LLM context windows. Our work enables AI features that truly understand your work—both…