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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 in the company's evolution.
The Platform team at Astronomer builds the foundational systems that power the company's multi-cloud infrastructure serving 800+ enterprise customers. This role is not about managing data or curating pipelines, but about designing and building the production systems that everything else runs on—systems where failure modes matter, latency budgets are real, and getting it wrong has visible consequences.
You will own the platform infrastructure strategy with full sponsorship and responsibility. You'll be directly involved in deciding what the team works on and how, making principled build-vs-buy assessments, and advocating for the right tools for the job. You'll create and maintain comprehensive internal documentation and decision records, participate in architectural forums, and make open decisions that the organization can learn from.
The role requires deep distributed systems expertise grounded in production experience. You should have a solid working model of how production systems fail—understanding consistency and availability tradeoffs, failure cascades, backpressure, and graceful degradation. You'll apply NALSD (Non-Abstract Large System Design) thinking to new system designs.
Required qualifications include Kubernetes expertise at operator depth (understanding scheduler internals and control loops under real load), strong Go proficiency with shipped production systems, and multi-cloud experience making architectural decisions across AWS, GCP, and/or Azure. You should have experience defining requirements and driving technology choices across engineering organizations, with strong written and verbal communication skills.
Bonus experience includes storage primitives at the system level, SaaS/PaaS product experience across multiple cloud providers, and familiarity with Apache Airflow or workflow orchestration systems. This is a hands-on role where you'll write both strategy documents and the code that proves them out.
About Astronomer
AI / Data / Infrastructure — data orchestration platform and commercial home of Apache Airflow.
