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Salary: USD 277,000 - 390,000 / annual
Astronomer is seeking a Principal Software Engineer to lead technical architecture and engineering excellence for a cloud-agnostic, self-contained data orchestration platform built on Apache Airflow. This role owns the end-to-end design and implementation of both control plane and data plane services that enable enterprise customers to provision, scale, and orchestrate Airflow instances entirely on-premises, without reliance on external SaaS infrastructure or mandatory outbound communication.
You will architect a resilient, extensible platform that operates reliably across diverse enterprise network environments—from standard customer-managed clouds to strictly isolated, air-gapped deployments. Key responsibilities include defining and building core infrastructure architecture; designing a robust, versioned platform API (REST/gRPC) that powers customer-facing UIs and programmatic integrations; architecting comprehensive observability (metrics, logs, traces) for the control plane and provisioned Airflow instances; and ensuring all services, images, dependencies, and configurations function seamlessly across varied isolation levels.
As the technical face of the team, you will translate complex enterprise infrastructure requirements into execution roadmaps, align closely with product and executive stakeholders, and mentor senior engineers through design reviews, high-leverage code contributions, and direct career guidance.
Required: 10+ years of professional software engineering at Staff/Senior Staff/Principal level in enterprise infrastructure, DBaaS, or private cloud. Proven expertise building production-grade control planes and APIs; cloud-native observability design (Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, Grafana); strong Kubernetes operational and architectural knowledge including custom Operators and Helm; hands-on hybrid cloud architecture across AWS, GCP, Azure, OpenShift, and bare-metal; expert-level coding (Go, Python, TypeScript) with deep distributed systems knowledge (Etcd, Consul, PostgreSQL, concurrency, network security); and exceptional technical communication skills including RFC authorship and executive-level presentation.
About Astronomer
AI / Data / Infrastructure — data orchestration platform and commercial home of Apache Airflow.
