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Salary: USD 275,000 - 377,000 / annual
Astronomer is seeking a Staff-level Software Engineer to own and develop platform infrastructure strategy for Astro, the industry-leading unified DataOps platform powered by Apache Airflow. This is a foundational technical role at a critical moment for the company, where your work will directly shape product capabilities across Astro, Observe, and the IDE over the next several years.
You will be responsible for architecting and building the foundational systems that power Astronomer's complex, multi-cloud platform serving over 800 enterprise customers. This is not a management role—you'll be deeply involved in both designing and implementing these systems, where failure modes matter, latency budgets are real, and decisions have visible consequences for enterprise customers.
Key responsibilities include: owning and developing platform infrastructure strategy with full sponsorship and accountability; making principled build-vs-buy assessments and advocating for the right tools; creating and maintaining comprehensive internal documentation and architectural decision records; and participating in architectural forums to drive principled, transparent decisions across the organization.
You should bring deep distributed systems expertise grounded in production experience, including solid understanding of consistency/availability tradeoffs, failure cascades, and graceful degradation. Kubernetes expertise at operator depth is essential—you've operated clusters under real load and understand scheduler and control loop behavior. Strong Go proficiency is required; you've built and shipped production systems in Go and have informed opinions on code quality.
Multi-cloud experience across AWS, GCP, and/or Azure is critical—you've made architectural tradeoffs and lived with those decisions in production, not just consumed managed services. You should have experience defining requirements and driving technology choices across engineering organizations, with strong written and verbal communication skills including the ability to write persuasive design documents and insightful postmortems.
Bonus qualifications include experience with storage primitives at the system level, SaaS/PaaS product experience across multiple cloud providers, and familiarity with Apache Airflow or workflow orchestration systems.
About Astronomer
AI / Data / Infrastructure — data orchestration platform and commercial home of Apache Airflow.
