Principal Software Engineer, Astronomer
$277-390k
+ Equity
Data orchestration platform
Be an early applicant
Data orchestration platform
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
$277-390k
+ Equity
1001+ employees
Company mission
To help companies build, run, and observe their data pipelines.
Role
Who you are
- Extensive Infrastructure Experience: 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a significant track record operating at a Staff, Senior Staff, or Principal level within an enterprise infrastructure, database-as-a-service (DBaaS), or private cloud organization
- Control Plane & API Productization: Proven success building production-grade infrastructure control planes, with a deep understanding of API design principles required to support programmatic customer workflows and user interfaces
- Cloud-Native Observability Expertise: Practical experience designing and implementing infrastructure observability stacks (e.g., Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, Grafana) to capture, aggregate, and surface system health and workflow data within isolated environments
- Strong Kubernetes Foundation: Solid operational knowledge and architectural understanding of container orchestration platforms, specifically Kubernetes
- You have practical experience building custom Kubernetes Operators (CRDs), managing Helm deployments, and working with the Kubernetes API to orchestrate application lifecycles
- Hybrid Cloud Architecture: Hands-on systems design expertise involving isolated environments across multiple public cloud providers (AWS, GCP, Azure), Red Hat OpenShift enterprise deployments, and bare-metal on-premise infrastructure
- Advanced Coding & Systems Design: Expert-level software development skills (e.g., Go, Python, TypeScript) with deep knowledge of distributed state stores (such as Etcd, Consul, or PostgreSQL), concurrency, and network security patterns
- Top-Notch Technical Communication: Exceptional oral and written communication skills with a proven ability to author crisp, high-density technical "one-pagers" and actionable RFCs
- You can drive fast organizational alignment by distilling complex systems choices into brief, highly readable documents, presenting confidently to executive leadership, and engaging deeply with strategic enterprise clients to unearth their core infrastructure requirements
What the job involves
- 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
- Define, Design, and Build Core Architecture: Own the end-to-end definition, design, and implementation of both the control plane and data plane services, creating highly resilient inter-connections between them to power this self-contained infrastructure platform
- Architect an Extensible Platform API: Drive the design, data modeling, versioning, and long-term backward compatibility of robust APIs (such as REST or gRPC). These APIs serve as the core platform engine that power the customer-facing UI, and the developer endpoints for customer-facing programmatic integrations
- Design Comprehensive Platform Observability: Architect the telemetry framework (metrics, logs, and traces) for the self-contained platform itself, ensuring deep visibility into both the core control plane services and the performance, health, and status of the underlying Airflow instances it provisions
- Architect for Varied Isolation Levels: Oversee the architecture of a self-contained software platform, ensuring all services, images, dependencies, and configurations can run smoothly whether deployed in connected private clouds or highly secure, zero-egress networks
- Provide Technical Leadership: Act as the technical face of the team, translating complex enterprise infrastructure needs into execution roadmaps while aligning closely with product management and executive stakeholders
- Mentor and Elevate: Foster a culture of engineering and operational excellence through comprehensive design reviews, high-leverage code contributions, and direct career mentorship for senior engineers
Our take
Developing data pipelines is essential for modern businesses to stay competitive, but building them can be a slow process. Workflow management tools for data engineering pipelines such as Apache Airflow makes the development process significantly simpler, but managing it manually is still a repetitive, convoluted, and time-consuming process.
Astronomer provides a data orchestration platform called Astro powered by Apache Airflow, aiming to automate its data pipeline management processes, unify data flows, and ultimately help businesses to access the software's full potential without DevOps. The company claims that its collaborative system helps teams to build data pipelines faster, increase data availability, ensure runtime environments are reliable within cloud infrastructures, and provide a holistic overview of business data.
Whilst it is undeniable that the company faces competition from other data orchestration platforms, Astronomer has been smart to recognize the presence of inefficiencies in Apache Airflow, despite its great potential. The company is thus providing solutions to improve it, not replace it, a unique perspective that shows great potential for Astronomer to disrupt the market.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
-26% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 9 rounds)
May 2025
$93m
SERIES D
Mar 2022
$213m
SERIES C
Total funding: $372.8m
Company benefits
- Remote friendly, work from anywhere
- If you’re in a city with an office, it’s there (and stocked with snacks) when you need it
- Co-workers in over 40 states and 15 countries around the world
- Health, dental, and vision insurance at little to no cost for individuals, and at competitive rates for your dependents
- Disability and life insurance policies in case something happens
- Unlimited vacation - we do track vacation days and actively encourage people to take it (on average, Astronomers take 20 days of vacation per year)
- Parental leave
- Laptop of your choice, and a stipend to help with your work-from-home setup
- Monthly $170 pre-tax stipend intended to cover your cellphone and WiFi bills
- Yearly internal summit for all employees
- Regular access to conferences, workshops, and meetups in the ecosystem
Company HQ
Flatiron District, New York, NY
Leadership
Greg Neiheisel
(Co-founder)Software Engineer for Great American Insurance from 2011 to 2013. Experience as Founder and CTO of USERcycle.
Tim Brunk
(Co-founder)Co-founder of Cladwell since 2012 and of Ocean Accelerator since 2014. Founder of MetaRouter since 2018.
Pete DeJoy
(CEO & Co-founder)Fellow at Venture for America since 2016. Has held many roles at the company, including SVP of Product and CPO, becoming CEO in 2025.
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