Customer Reliability Engineer, Airflow

📋 Description

• • As a Customer Reliability Engineer (CRE) specializing in Apache Airflow at Astronomer, you will be at the forefront of empowering data teams to build and deploy mission-critical data products, analytics, and AI solutions. You will leverage your technical acumen and customer-centric approach to ensure the seamless operation and optimal performance of our industry-leading unified DataOps platform, Astro, powered by Apache Airflow®. This role offers an unparalleled opportunity to become a deep expert in Apache Airflow, learning directly from the project's leaders and applying that knowledge to solve complex challenges for our sophisticated enterprise clientele.
• • Your primary responsibility will be to provide expert-level Apache Airflow guidance and support to customers, enabling them to maximize their utilization of our managed Airflow service. This involves a unique blend of deep technical knowledge and profound customer empathy, ensuring you not only understand the technical intricacies of their issues but also the business impact and their desired outcomes. Every day presents a new technical puzzle and a fresh learning opportunity, making this a dynamic and intellectually stimulating environment.
• • You will immerse yourself in a variety of software engineering disciplines, gaining hands-on experience and building expertise in areas crucial to modern data infrastructure. This includes a deep dive into Airflow and data engineering principles, a thorough understanding of Kubernetes for container orchestration, and comprehensive cloud engineering practices across major providers like AWS, GCP, and Azure.
• • Beyond the technical, you will gain exposure to the broader business landscape, understanding product development cycles, engineering strategies, and effective customer relationship management. This holistic view will equip you with a comprehensive understanding of how technical solutions contribute to business success.
• • The core of your role will involve tackling challenging Airflow-related problems for our customers. This could range from intricate configuration optimizations to identifying and diagnosing novel, potentially world-first, bugs within the Airflow ecosystem. You will be exposed to a wide spectrum of issues, ensuring continuous learning and skill development.
• • A significant and exciting aspect of this role is the opportunity to dedicate up to 25% of your time to impactful side projects. These projects are designed to directly contribute to Astronomer's overall success and innovation. Examples include contributing to the open-source Apache Airflow repository, thereby influencing the future of the project, or developing and enhancing Astronomer’s internal monitoring and alerting systems, which are themselves built upon Airflow.
• • You will work with a cutting-edge, cloud-native product that serves as a central hub for customers, connecting to dozens of other critical systems. This provides an opportunity to gain both depth and breadth of knowledge in distributed systems and data integration.
• • A key part of your role will be direct engagement with our customers' technical teams, including their data engineers, system administrators, DevOps professionals, and management. Building strong relationships and understanding their unique operational environments will be paramount.
• • You will play a vital role in shaping the future of the Airflow project by providing valuable feedback derived from your direct customer interactions and technical experiences. Your insights will directly influence the project's roadmap and development.
• • You will take ownership of the customer experience, proactively working with clients to prioritize and resolve issues, consistently meet Service Level Agreements (SLAs), and provide exceptional, "white glove" guidance to help them successfully navigate their path to production environments.
• • This position operates within a fully distributed team, fostering a collaborative and flexible remote work environment. You will participate in maintaining 24x7 coverage through a structured 6-hour pager period during your standard workday, ensuring timely responses to critical issues.
• • Furthermore, you will participate in a paid on-call rotation, providing essential weekend coverage and ensuring continuous support for our global customer base.