Staff Software Engineer, Observability

About the role

Astronomer’s R&D organization is dedicated to providing an exceptional experience in operating data orchestration based on Apache Airflow at many of the world’s largest companies. We are building out a world-class Observability team to deliver data observability capabilities that provide customers visibility, reliability, and actionable insights into their data pipelines and products across some of the world’s largest enterprises.

As a Staff Software Engineer, you will contribute directly to the design, development, and scaling of Astronomer’s observability platform, collaborating closely with product, design, and cross-functional engineering teams. Your work will have a direct impact on our customers and the future of the platform.

Responsibilities

• Lead the end-to-end architecture and evolution of major platform components, making foundational design decisions that will shape the long-term direction of the observability platform.
• Build scalable, reliable, and performant features that provide visibility into customer data pipelines.
• Collaborate closely with product, design, and engineering teams to define and deliver high-impact initiatives.
• Write high-quality, maintainable code while following best practices in testing, CI/CD, and operational excellence.
• Set and champion engineering standards for code quality, testing, design, and operational excellence across the team.
• Improve and evolve the observability platform’s tooling, infrastructure, and processes.
• Lead and coordinate responses to complex production incidents, guiding the team towards rapid resolution and long-term improvements.
• Proactively identify technical opportunities, risks, and gaps—and drive initiatives to address them.
• Mentor engineers of all levels through design reviews, pairing, and feedback, and contribute to the professional growth of the team.

Requirements

• Strong technical experience building complex distributed systems, preferably with Golang, Python, Kubernetes, SQL/OLAP databases, Kafka, and stream processing.
• Hands-on experience designing, developing, and scaling production infrastructure.
• Excellent collaboration and communication skills to work effectively across teams.
• Focus on delivering customer value through thoughtful technical solutions.
• Enthusiasm for contributing to a healthy, inclusive engineering culture and supporting the growth of teammates.
• Comfort working in areas of high ambiguity, able to break down open-ended problems and drive them to completion with clarity and structure.

Nice-to-have

• Experience building or scaling data observability products.
• Familiarity with Apache Airflow or similar workflow orchestrators.
• Background in observability, monitoring, or infrastructure at scale (e.g., Datadog, Honeycomb, or similar).
• Experience working directly with product teams.

Pay

The estimated salary for this role ranges from $275,000 to $377,000 based on leveling and geography, along with an equity component and a comprehensive benefits package.