Senior Airflow Reliability Engineer

📋 Description

• • As a Senior Airflow Reliability Engineer at Astronomer, you will immerse yourself in the world of Apache Airflow, becoming a subject matter expert and a trusted advisor to our sophisticated enterprise clientele. This role is pivotal within the Customer Reliability Engineering (CRE) team, a group that distinguishes itself by offering a level of technical expertise far beyond traditional support. You will be instrumental in ensuring the consistent, high-performance operation of mission-critical data pipelines and applications powered by our managed Airflow service, Astro.
• • Your primary responsibility will be to leverage your deep technical knowledge and customer-centric approach to resolve complex challenges faced by our customers. This involves a unique blend of problem-solving, technical guidance, and proactive engagement, ensuring that customers maximize the value derived from Astronomer's platform. Every interaction presents an opportunity to diagnose intricate issues, optimize configurations, and potentially identify and contribute to fixing novel bugs within the Airflow ecosystem.
• • You will gain unparalleled exposure to a wide array of cutting-edge software engineering disciplines. This includes developing profound expertise in Airflow itself, mastering data engineering principles, and becoming proficient in cloud-native technologies such as Kubernetes and various cloud provider services (AWS, GCP, Azure). This broad and deep learning experience will provide a comprehensive understanding of modern data infrastructure.
• • Beyond technical intricacies, you will develop a holistic view of the business, gaining insights into product development, broader engineering strategies, and effective customer relationship management. This exposure will equip you with a well-rounded perspective on how technical solutions contribute to overall business success.
• • A significant aspect of this role involves actively contributing to the evolution of the Airflow project. Up to 20% of your time can be dedicated to impactful side projects. These could range from direct contributions to the open-source Apache Airflow repository, enhancing its capabilities and reliability, to developing and refining Astronomer’s internal monitoring and alerting systems, which are themselves built upon Airflow.
• • You will work with a sophisticated, cloud-native product that serves as a central hub, connecting dozens of disparate systems for our customers. This provides a rich environment for continuous learning and skill development, exposing you to diverse technological stacks and integration patterns.
• • Direct engagement with customer-facing teams, including their data engineers, system administrators, DevOps professionals, and management, is a core component of the role. You will act as a technical liaison, understanding their unique challenges and providing expert solutions.
• • Your insights and experiences will directly influence the future direction of the Airflow project. By providing feedback from real-world customer implementations, you will play a crucial role in shaping the roadmap and enhancements of this widely adopted open-source technology.
• • You will take ownership of the customer experience, from initial issue resolution to long-term strategic guidance. This includes prioritizing and solving customer issues, consistently meeting Service Level Agreements (SLAs), and offering "white glove" support and best practices to guide customers on their journey to production readiness.
• • This role offers the flexibility of remote participation within a fully distributed global team, fostering collaboration across different time zones and geographies.
• • To ensure continuous service availability for our customers, you will participate in a specified 6-hour pager period during your standard workday, contributing to the maintenance of 24x7 coverage.
• • You will also be part of a paid on-call rotation, providing essential support during weekends to address any urgent customer needs that may arise outside of regular business hours.