Software Engineer - Data Plane Management

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. To learn more, visit www.astronomer.io.

About this role

At Astronomer, we’re on a mission to make Apache Airflow the go-to standard for data orchestration, and our R&D team is at the heart of it.

We’re looking for a Software Engineer (Early Career / Recent Grad) to join our Data Plane Management team, which is responsible for the ‘compute cluster’ primitive in our product, along with all the provisioned cloud & Kubernetes resources that support our customer workloads.

This is a fantastic opportunity to work in a role where you’re not only learning how to manage Kubernetes infrastructure at scale, but also how to do this as part of an actual product, responding to customer requirements, building APIs and tooling along the way. You’ll work with critical real-world production systems, collaborate with brilliant engineers, and directly impact how companies around the world manage their data.

We’re looking for someone who is in early career or recently graduated, and has the goal to be a very strong backend engineer in their career with a focus on cloud infrastructure. At Astronomer, infrastructure is at the heart of our product, and this team owns that foundation.

What you get to do:

Astronomer has a healthy and complex infrastructure fleet spanning multiple cloud providers, a mix of managed and self-hosted systems, and an increasingly ambitious set of requirements as our products mature. You’ll get to contribute to a fundamental part of our product, the provisioning and ongoing management of our compute platform, translating requirements from product owners to customer facing features that drive the core of our business.

You’ll learn how to identify weaknesses in our platform through incident review, and develop solutions to minimize impact and recurrence.

This role is based in New York City and follows an in-office work schedule.

What you bring to the role:

• A Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent practical experience).

• A strong interest in infrastructure / platform engineering, particularly the challenge of managing live stateful customer compute workloads.

• Foundational understanding of distributed systems concepts, such as microservice architecture, networking protocols such as TCP/IP, TLS, and HTTP.

• A strong interest in reasoning about large scale systems, for example non-abstract system design.

• Exposure to at least one backend programming language such as Go, through coursework, internships, or personal projects.

• Strong written and verbal communication skills, with a collaborative mindset.

• Familiarity with software development best practices, such as code reviews, testing, version control, and debugging.

• Experience leveraging AI coding assistants and LLMs (e.g., Claude, Cursor, Gemini) to accelerate development — from prototyping and automated testing to code refactoring and documentation.

Bonus points if you have:

• Internship or co-op experience in a software engineering role.

• Experience with Go.

• Experience with at least one cloud provider: AWS, Azure or GCP.

• Experience with Kubernetes for platform management

• Experience with Linux

• Familiarity with Apache Airflow or related workflow orchestrators.

• Contributions to open source projects.

The estimated salary for this role ranges from $120,000 - $160,000 based on leveling and geography, along with an equity component and a comprehensive benefits package. This range is merely an estimate; actual compensation may deviate from this range based on skills, experience, and qualifications.

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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.