Staff Software Engineer - Python 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.

Our R&D organization is home to some of the most innovative minds in cloud infrastructure and open-source software. We’re looking to add a world-class Staff+ level engineer to our team, to set out our Data and Database story as we level up our platform’s Reliability, cost profile and growth trajectory.

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.

Be a subject-matter expert in how we treat Data at scale. Astronomer has a number of different databases and data sources at work providing our platform, and our needs are evolving. We’re looking for a database and data platforms expert to map out how we store, retrieve, keep safe, and otherwise be responsible curators of ours and customers’ data.

Astronomer’s stack is fairly heavily Postgres-based, with some blob storage and some specialised options for certain data types - you get to recommend, design and later lead building the data systems that will help us continue to scale. You’ll be just as active in building these systems and ensuring they’re fit for purpose as specifying and designing.

You will own and develop our Database and overall data strategy and practice, with sponsorship and responsibility to match – this role reports directly to the VP of Reliability. Create and maintain comprehensive internal documentation and decision records for systems and processes, ensuring clarity and accessibility.

Extensive knowledge of Postgres and Postgres-like cloud offerings (AWS, GCP, Azure) is required, along with extensive and recent experience with building low-level data systems and/or managed data platforms. In-depth knowledge and practical experience of the product and technology space in Database and related fields (Blob, NoSQL, Timeseries, Graph, Vector) is essential.

Experience defining requirements and making and justifying technology choices around the data space is necessary, as well as strong experience in Non-Abstract Systems design and implementation.

Bonus points if you have:

• Experience working with Spanner, AlloyDB and/or other cloud-native databases, including hands-on experience with provisioning, development practices and migration of data.
• Experience building internal data platforms from cloud-native component parts - we have a healthy mix of build vs. buy; sometimes building is the right choice.

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.