Principal engineer to lead architecture and technical direction for a self-contained, cloud-agnostic platform that provisions and orchestrates Apache Airflow instances inside customer environments, including air-gapped networks. Work covers control plane and data plane design, platform APIs (REST or gRPC), and observability. Stack includes Kubernetes (Operators, Helm), Go, Python, TypeScript, Etcd/Consul/PostgreSQL, and Prometheus/OpenTelemetry/Grafana.
Astronomer empowers data teams to bring mission-critical software, analytics, and AI to life and is the company behind Astro, the industry-leading unified DataOps platform powered by Apache Airflow®. Astro accelerates building reliable data products that unlock insights, unleash AI value, and power data-driven applications. Trusted by more than 900 of the world’s leading enterprises, including Datadog, American Express, Expedia, Adobe, Autodesk, Together AI, and more, Astronomer lets businesses do more with their data. To learn more, visit www.astronomer.io.
About the Role
We are seeking an exceptional Principal Software Engineer to provide technical leadership, architectural vision, and team mentorship for our core engineering group. In this role, you will be the primary architect and public face of a cloud-agnostic software platform that helps enterprise customers provision, scale, and orchestrate Apache Airflow instances completely on-premises within their own environments.
This is a unique infrastructure challenge: our platform is designed to be completely self-contained, operating without reliance on an external SaaS backbone or mandatory outbound communication. Both our control plane and data planes deploy locally inside the customer’s infrastructure. You will lead the engineering team in defining, designing, and building these systems to function reliably across a spectrum of enterprise network setups—ranging from standard customer-managed clouds to strictly isolated, air-gapped environments.
What You'll Do
What You'll Bring
The estimated total compensation for this role ranges from $277,000 - $390,000, along with an equity component and a comprehensive benefits package. 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.
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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.