Principal Software Engineer

About the role

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 powers data-driven applications. Trusted by more than 800 of the world's leading enterprises, Astronomer lets businesses do more with their data.

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

• 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.

What You'll Bring

• 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.

Pay and benefits

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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