Senior Software Engineer, Platform in London

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 this role: At Astronomer, we’re redefining how companies run Apache Airflow at scale. Our R&D organization is home to some of the most innovative minds in cloud infrastructure and open‑source software. We’re looking for a Senior Software Engineer to join our Platform Engineering team. You get to go in at the ground level of how our production infrastructure is designed, built, tested and deployed. Your work will directly influence how we build Astro, Observe and our IDE product, as well as how global organizations orchestrate data pipelines at scale—making them faster, more reliable, and easier to manage. If you’re driven by impact, excited by scale, and ready to work on the kind of infrastructure challenges that push the boundaries of what’s possible in cloud‑native systems, this is the opportunity you’ve been waiting for.

What you get to do:

• Make high‑quality, data‑driven and experience‑driven decisions on how we build this and the next generation of our production platform, then deliver the results.
• Own and build how we test, build and deploy code in a high‑scale PaaS environment.
• Collaborate across the whole company on how we design production systems, set standards and make technology choices for new and existing products, and how these fit together.
• Deliver results – we routinely “change the wheels on the bus while it’s moving”, in a predictable, safe and reliable way.
• Be at the forefront of how we work together as a Platform Engineering team.
• Work on a small but growing team on building out the Platform/Reliability practice for the company – this role reports directly to the VP of Reliability.
• Be directly involved in decision‑making on what we work on, as well as how we work on it. Make promises, and keep them.
• Participate in incident management and determine sensible practices as the platform evolves.
• Create and maintain comprehensive internal documentation for systems and processes, ensuring clarity and accessibility.

What you bring to the role:

• Strong experience in Non‑Abstract Systems design and implementation.
• Strong proficiency in Python, Golang and in‑depth experience with Kubernetes (CKA or equivalent or greater).
• Experience with observability principles and technologies, including SLI/SLO definition and tracking.
• Strong communication skills, both written and verbal, with experience in working with a globally distributed team in delivery.
• A passion for reliability and operational excellence. A low tolerance for toil and other nonsense.
• Ability to estimate the scope of work accurately and coordinate with stakeholders to address risks and ensure successful project delivery.
• Experience with (and ideally strong opinions on) software development best practices, such as code review, testing, CI/CD, version control, automation and debugging.
• Proactive approach to identifying and addressing issues, with a focus on ownership and accountability.

Bonus points if you have:

• Experience working on a SaaS/PaaS product across multiple cloud providers.
• Experience with our particular tech stack components and technologies (deep breath): CircleCI, Chronosphere (Prometheus), Splunk, Bazel, Istio, Playwright, Karpenter, Github Actions …
• Experience of the innards and quirks of AWS, GCP and (particularly) Azure.
• Participated in an on‑call rotation – this role involves periodic on‑call for the services we own.
• Experience with Apache Airflow.

At Astronomer, we value diversity. We are an equal opportunity employer: we do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.