Senior Software Engineer, Astronomer
Applied AI
$180-210k
+ Equity
Data orchestration platform
Open for applications
Data orchestration platform
1001+ employees
Open for applications
$180-210k
+ Equity
1001+ employees
Company mission
To help companies build, run, and observe their data pipelines.
Role
Who you are
- Empathy for users, and a deep interest in improving the workflows of data professionals
- Familiarity with early-stage product development; comfortable working with ambiguity in a fast-changing field
- Experience with LLMs, vector databases, embeddings, or other applied AI areas—or a strong desire to dive in
- A creative, experimental mindset: you enjoy exploring uncharted areas, validating hypotheses, and learning through iteration
- Strong collaboration and communication skills—you can explain complex systems clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences
- A collaborative approach and comfort working in an evolving, research-driven environment where ideas move quickly
Desirable
- A passion for AI systems for data, developer tools, or machine learning infrastructure
- Familiarity with Apache Airflow or other orchestration tools
- Demonstrated contributions to open source projects
- Experience in search, IR, or large-scale data infrastructure
- Exposure to early-stage startups or R&D organizations where ambiguity is the norm
What the job involves
- As a Software Engineer on this team, you’ll help design and build this foundation and the applications around it
- You’ll work on some of the hardest and most exciting challenges in data—search, information retrieval, and AI for data pracitioners—while collaborating with a small, highly skilled team that values velocity, creativity, and impact
- This role sits at the intersection of applied research, software engineering, and product: we think it takes someone who can work across the stack to build, release, and scale products successfully in this space
- Shape the future of AI for data engineering - build intelligent systems that understand, reason about, and optimize the flow of data across entire organizations
- Design and engineer the brain of Astronomer’s context layer, crafting components that power data modeling, semantic search, retrieval, and code generation
- Push the boundaries of applied AI - experiment with LLMs, embeddings, and cutting-edge retrieval techniques to create developer tools that deliver insights to you and our customers
- Turn research into reality - work side by side with R&D and product teams to bring early AI concepts to life in the product experience
- Solve high-impact information retrieval and search challenges at a global scale, leveraging Astronomer’s unparalleled visibility into data pipelines across industries
- Influence the technical vision and architecture for the next generation of AI-driven data products
- Represent Astronomer in the community - through open-source contributions, technical talks, and publications that showcase our leadership in AI and data innovation
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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