Staff Software Engineer, Platform Infrastructure at Astronomer

We are Astronomer, the company behind Astro, the industry-leading unified DataOps platform powered by Apache Airflow. Our platform enables data teams at more than 800 leading enterprises to build reliable data products, unlock insights, and power data-driven applications. We are seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join our Platform Infrastructure team and help shape the foundational systems that support our growing suite of products.

Key outcomes

• Own and evolve the platform infrastructure strategy across multiple cloud environments, ensuring reliability, scalability, and operational maturity.
• Design, build, and operate production-grade systems that serve as the foundation for our products, including Astro, Observe, and our integrated development environment.
• Make and document principled technology decisions, including build-versus-buy assessments, and communicate these choices clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Produce comprehensive internal documentation and decision records that enable the broader engineering organization to understand, maintain, and extend our platform systems.
• Collaborate directly with engineering leadership to define priorities, set technical direction, and deliver measurable improvements in system performance and resilience.

Requirements

• Extensive hands-on experience designing and operating distributed systems at scale, including a deep understanding of consistency models, failure modes, backpressure, and graceful degradation.
• Proven expertise operating Kubernetes clusters under production load, including knowledge of scheduler behavior and control-loop dynamics.
• Strong proficiency in Go, with a track record of building and shipping production systems in the language.
• Demonstrated experience making architectural decisions across AWS, GCP, and Azure, including evaluating trade-offs and supporting those decisions in live environments.
• Experience defining technical requirements and influencing technology choices across engineering teams.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to produce clear design documents and postmortems that improve organizational learning.
• Fluency in English and the ability to work effectively within a globally distributed team.

Preferred qualifications

• Experience evaluating and selecting storage primitives such as relational databases and object stores based on real-world system requirements and past failures.
• Prior work on SaaS or PaaS products deployed across multiple cloud providers.
• Familiarity with Apache Airflow or other workflow orchestration systems.

Compensation

The salary range for this position is $215,000 to $250,000. In addition to base salary, the role includes equity compensation and access to a comprehensive benefits package. Actual compensation will be determined based on skills, experience, and qualifications.

How to apply

We invite qualified candidates to submit their application through our careers portal. We look forward to reviewing your background and learning how your experience aligns with this opportunity.