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Salary: USD 210,000 - 250,000 / 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 worldwide. The company is building Astro, a unified DataOps platform that accelerates reliable data product development.
As a Senior Software Engineer on the R&D 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: 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 translate early AI concepts into production features
- Influencing technical vision and architecture for next-generation AI-driven data products
- Contributing to open-source initiatives and representing Astronomer in the community
You bring 5-8 years of software engineering experience with Python or Go, deep empathy for data professionals' workflows, and comfort with ambiguity in fast-changing fields. Experience with LLMs, vector databases, embeddings, or applied AI is expected or strongly desired. You're creative, experimental, and collaborative—able to explain complex systems clearly to technical and non-technical audiences.
Bonus qualifications include passion for AI systems for data and developer tools, familiarity with Apache Airflow, open-source contributions, experience in search/IR/large-scale data infrastructure, and exposure to early-stage startups or R&D environments.
About Astronomer
AI / Data / Infrastructure — data orchestration platform and commercial home of Apache Airflow.
