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Salary: USD 168,000 - 230,000 / annual
Astronomer is the company behind Apache Airflow, the industry-leading open-source data orchestration platform used by Airbnb, Uber, OpenAI, Anthropic, Nike, Capital One, Disney, and 800+ enterprises globally. The company is building Astro, a unified DataOps platform that accelerates reliable data product development.
As a Senior Software Engineer on the Applied AI team, you'll help design and build a global context layer for data—an intelligence layer that powers semantic search, code generation, and automated root cause analysis for data practitioners. This role sits at the intersection of applied research, software engineering, and product development.
Key responsibilities include:
- Designing and engineering core components of the context layer, including data modeling, semantic search, retrieval systems, and code generation
- Experimenting with LLMs, embeddings, and cutting-edge retrieval techniques to create developer tools
- Solving high-impact information retrieval and search challenges at global scale, leveraging Astronomer's visibility into data pipelines across industries
- Collaborating with R&D and product teams to bring early AI concepts into production
- Influencing technical vision and architecture for next-generation AI-driven data products
- Contributing to open source and representing Astronomer in the community through technical talks and publications
You bring empathy for data professionals, experience with LLMs, vector databases, embeddings, or applied AI systems, and a creative, experimental mindset. You're comfortable with ambiguity in fast-changing fields, excel at collaboration, and can explain complex systems clearly. Bonus experience includes familiarity with Apache Airflow, open-source contributions, search/IR expertise, large-scale data infrastructure knowledge, early-stage startup exposure, or agentic systems development.
About Astronomer
AI / Data / Infrastructure — data orchestration platform and commercial home of Apache Airflow.
