Joel Lithgow

Dear Hiring Manager,

I am writing to express my interest in the Software Engineer position on Asana's AI Teammates team. I've spent the past year deeply immersed in agentic development workflows—not building agents, but using them daily to ship real work. That experience has given me strong intuition about what makes AI teammates useful versus frustrating, and I'm ready to apply that understanding to building them.

Claude Code is central to my workflow. I use it to build WebGL shaders, orchestrate complex multi-step development tasks, and ship prototypes that would have taken weeks in days. I've developed my own patterns for prompt orchestration, learned when to trust agent output and when to verify, and built mental models for how agents maintain context across long sessions. This isn't theoretical interest in AI—it's daily practice with the exact category of product you're building.

I bring seven years of experience at California College of the Arts, progressing from QA Specialist to Interaction Designer to UX Designer/Developer. That trajectory gave me something valuable for this role: I understand how to build reliable systems (from QA), how users think about tools (from design), and how to ship production code (from development). The AI Teammates team's close collaboration with PM, Design, and Research matches how I already work.

My QA background is particularly relevant for building evaluation harnesses and guardrails. I started my career testing software systematically, developing frameworks for identifying edge cases and measuring reliability. I recently implemented Playwright-based automation for complex workflows, demonstrating my ability to build evaluation systems that catch problems before users do. Agent reliability is fundamentally a testing problem, and I know how to approach testing problems.

I'm excited about the ambiguity inherent in this work. The job description says 'this work is at the bleeding edge and adapts as the industry evolves'—that's exactly where I want to be. I've watched the AI tooling landscape transform over the past year, adapted my workflows as capabilities evolved, and developed intuition for what's changing and what patterns persist. I learn fast because I'm genuinely curious about this space.

I'm based in Oakland and the hybrid schedule in San Francisco works well for me. The opportunity to work with Anthropic's partnership on building agents that help teams get work done—not just track it—is exactly the kind of meaningful technical challenge I'm seeking.

Thank you for considering my application. I would welcome the opportunity to discuss how my experience as a power user of agentic systems, combined with my engineering and product background, could contribute to the AI Teammates team.