Senior Design Engineer, Astronomer

• 5+ years of experience in product design or front-end engineering
• A strong grasp of UX and accessibility principles, complemented by sophisticated visual aesthetic and taste
• Proficiency in JavaScript (preferably Typescript + React) and CSS, including DOM manipulation
• Empathy for users and a genuine interest in enhancing the workflows of data professionals
• Ability to prototype quickly, iterate based on feedback, and drive towards production-ready code
• Comfort with end-to-end UI delivery—from sketch to code to deployment—while fostering collaborative product team environments
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, enabling you to speak design language with designers and engineering language with developers
• A problem-solving mindset, allowing you to weigh UX/design value against implementation cost, make trade-offs, and prioritize effectively
• Familiarity with early-stage product development and comfort navigating ambiguity in a rapidly evolving field
• A high standard of excellence, where you obsess over important details without striving for unattainable perfection

Desirable

• As a Design Engineer on the team, you’ll create designs and build the user experience for the Astro IDE, our new AI enabled software IDE built specifically for Data Engineers
• The IDE poses a few interesting design challenges: it’s a simplified IDE built specifically for writing data pipelines and comes with built-in experiences around testing data pipelines
• It also has an embedded code agent that has access to the user’s data platform context (tables, example queries, files, runtime information)
• We’re looking for someone to help scale the product from public preview and beyond, designing and building pleasant experiences around building data pipelines and interacting with agents
• Apache Airflow is one of the most popular open-source data platform tools
• It powers the data platforms at nearly every large company and fast-growing startups: Airbnb, Uber, OpenAI, Anthropic, Nike, Capital One, Disney all use Airflow extensively
• At Astronomer, we’re the largest contributors to the project and are building commercial products around Airflow to make it easier to use, run, and scale
• Transform design concepts into production-ready user interfaces, taking full ownership from initial idea to deployed code
• Champion design-led experimentation through prototyping, interaction testing, and rapid iteration, contributing to the evolution of our front-end architecture and design tools
• Deeply understand user needs by collaborating with engineering, product, and customer-facing teams to grasp the complete scope of problems you'll solve
• Contribute early design concepts as a core part of the product ideation and proposal process for critical feature sets
• Partner closely with product and engineering to sequence projects, deliver MVPs, make informed information architecture decisions, and uphold design standards within our codebase
• Elevate the product experience for developers by bringing consumer-grade UX, obsessing over details, and consistently shipping incremental improvements for a cohesive and thoughtful user experience