Staff Software Engineer (Platform Infrastructure)

Role Overview

Join Astronomer as a Staff Software Engineer (Platform Infrastructure). You’ll build the foundational platform systems that everything else runs on—shaping strategy, making build-vs-buy decisions, and driving architectural documentation and decision records.

Key Missions

• Own and develop the platform infrastructure strategy, including what to work on and how to execute it
• Build foundational systems that support Astronomer’s products, ensuring scalability and operational maturity
• Create and maintain comprehensive internal documentation and decision records for systems and processes
• Participate in architectural forums

Responsibilities

• Produce high-quality design documentation (e.g., design docs that influence decisions)
• Write strategy documents and implement the code that validates them
• Lead principled architecture tradeoffs and architectural decisions across the engineering org
• Provide deep operational and reliability guidance (including postmortems and failure-mode analysis)

Requirements

• Staff+ level experience building production platform systems at scale
• Strong written and verbal communication; can persuade with design docs and produce learning-oriented postmortems
• Experience working effectively in a globally-distributed team
• Distributed systems depth with practical knowledge of:
  • Consistency/availability tradeoffs
  • Failure cascades and backpressure
  • Graceful degradation
• Multi-cloud architectural experience across AWS, GCP, and/or Azure, including evaluating tradeoffs—not only consuming managed services
• Demonstrated ability to define requirements and drive technology choices across engineering
• Designed systems under load with careful reasoning about failure modes
• Go proficiency (platform team writes production Go; you’ve built and shipped in it)
• Kubernetes at operator depth, including understanding scheduler/control-loop behavior and operating clusters under real load
• Experience making technology calls and living with the consequences
• System-level storage primitives experience (relational vs object store vs alternatives, informed by real failures)
• Experience working on a SaaS/PaaS product across multiple cloud providers

Nice to Have

• Familiarity with Apache Airflow or other workflow orchestration systems