Staff Platform Infra Engineer (Multi-Cloud, Go) 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.

This role involves working on a complex, multi-cloud platform where the reliability, scalability, and operational maturity are key focuses. The work on our Platform team is about building foundational systems that everything else runs on, where failure modes matter and getting it wrong has visible consequences for hundreds of enterprise customers.

We’re looking for a Staff+-level engineer who has built production platform systems at scale before. You’ve designed systems under load, reasoned carefully about failure, and improved your colleagues’ experiences by providing solid and well-understood systems to build upon. You write strategy documents and then code that proves them out. You’ve made critical decisions and lived with the consequences.

This is a foundational role at a consequential moment: your work will directly shape what Astronomer’s products — Astro, Observe, and our IDE — are capable of over the next several years. This role reports directly to the VP responsible for delivering these platforms reliably.

What You Get To Do

• Astronomer has a healthy and complex infrastructure estate spanning multiple cloud providers, a mix of managed and self-hosted systems, and an increasingly ambitious set of requirements as our products evolve.
• This is a technical role — you’ll be involved in building these systems as well as specifying and designing them.
• Own and develop our platform infrastructure strategy, mapping out what we need, making calls, and owning the outcomes.
• Be directly involved in deciding what we work on and how we work on it. Make promises, and keep them.
• Make principled build vs. buy assessments and advocate for the right tools for the right job.
• Create and maintain comprehensive internal documentation and decision records for systems and processes.
• Participate in architectural forums and make principled, open decisions that the rest of the organisation can learn from.

What You Bring To The Role

• Depth in distributed systems, with a solid understanding of how production systems fail — including consistency and availability tradeoffs, failure cascades, backpressure, and graceful degradation.
• Experience with Kubernetes at operator depth, having operated clusters under real load.
• Strong proficiency in Go, with experience building and shipping systems in it.
• Multi-cloud experience, having made architectural decisions across AWS, GCP, and/or Azure.
• Experience defining requirements and driving technology choices across an engineering organisation.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills, able to write design documents and postmortems that enhance organisational knowledge.
• Experience working effectively in a globally-distributed team.

Bonus Points If You Have

• Experience with storage primitives at the system level.
• Experience working on a SaaS/PaaS product across multiple cloud providers.
• Familiarity with Apache Airflow or workflow orchestration systems.

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