Tech Lead, Platform Reliability Engineering

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. 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 your recruiter can share more about the in-office requirements.

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 t