Airflow Reliability Engineer

Astronomer designed Astro, an industry-leading, orchestration-first DataOps platform for data teams. Powered by Airflow, Astro accelerates building reliable data products that unlock insights, unleash AI value, and drive data-driven applications.

We’re a globally-distributed and rapidly growing venture-backed team of learners, innovators and collaborators. Our mission is to empower data teams to bring mission-critical analytics, AI, and software to life.  As a member of our team, you will be at the forefront of the industry as we strive to deliver the world's data. 

Your background may be unconventional; as long as you have the essential qualifications, we encourage you to apply. While having "bonus" qualifications makes for a strong candidate, Astronomer values diverse experiences. Many of us at Astronomer haven't followed traditional career paths, and we welcome it if yours hasn't either.

About this role:

As an Airflow Reliability Engineer on the Customer Reliability Engineering (CRE) team at Astronomer, you will have the opportunity to become an Apache Airflow expert, learning directly from leaders of the Airflow project. You’ll provide Apache Airflow expertise directly to customers to help them make the best possible use of our managed Airflow service. 

CRE is Astronomer’s support team. Because our customers are sophisticated organizations who need and expect high levels of expertise to help them keep mission critical uses of Apache Airflow working consistently, we look a little different from most support teams. Nearly every ticket you will work requires an intersection of strong technical knowledge and customer empathy to understand what the customer needs and how to get them there. Every day is a new challenge and a new thing to learn. 

When you learn a new piece of technology, are you aiming not just to get started but to become the expert? Do you listen to the plumber when they tell you what is wrong with the pipes? Are you the kind of person who takes an MIT OpenCourseWare course and actually finishes it? Then this role could be for you.

What you get to do:

• Learn and build expertise across several software engineering disciplines, including:
• Airflow and data engineering
• Kubernetes
• Cloud Engineering
• Gain exposure to the big picture; learn about product, engineering, customer relationship management, and more.
• Solve challenging Airflow problems for our customers. From optimizing configuration to identifying world-first Airflow bugs, you’ll see it all here.
• Spend up to 25% of your time on side projects that contribute to Astronomer’s overall success, such as contributing to the open-source Airflow repository or developing Astronomer’s internal monitoring and alerting systems built on Airflow.
• Work on a modern, sophisticated, cloud-native product that customers use to connect to dozens of other systems. Gain depth and breadth of learning!
• Work directly with our customers’ data engineers, system admins, DevOps teams, and management.
• Provide feedback from your experience that can shape the direction of the Airflow project.
• Own the customer experience, working directly with customers to prioritize and solve issues, meet SLAs, and provide “white glove” guidance on the path to production.
• Participate remotely within a fully distributed team.
• Help maintain 24x7 coverage through a specified 6-hour pager period during your work day.
• Participate in paid on-call rotation for weekend coverage.

What you bring to the role:

• Four years of professional experience (any industry)
• Proven proficiency in Python, with a minimum of two years of experience
• Experience with Kubernetes/Docker/Containers
• Experience working with a distributed system with any major cloud provider (AWS, GCP, Azure)
• Problem-solving and troubleshooting abilities
• Work well with autonomy and independence
• Strong written and verbal communication for connecting with our customers over our ticketing system and through Zoom

Bonus points if you have:

• Experience in Airflow administration and DAG creation
• Contributions to open-source projects
• Customer Support experience
• Familiarity with SQL and PostgreSQL
• Experience with Databricks, Snowflake, Redshift, dbt, or other similar data engineering tools

The estimated salary for this role ranges from $130,000 - $160,000, along with an equity component. This range is merely an estimate, and the width of the range reflects willingness to consider candidates with broad prior seniority. Actual compensation may deviate from this range based on skills, experience, and qualifications.

At Astronomer, we value diversity. We are an equal opportunity employer: we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.  Astronomer is a remote-first company.