---
title: 'Customer Reliability Engineer (Airflow) at Astronomer'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/customer-reliability-engineer-airflow-astronomer-united-states-1w670pzygeqd'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-11'
---

# Customer Reliability Engineer (Airflow) at Astronomer

- **Company:** Astronomer
- **Location:** United States
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** remote
- **Posted:** 2026-09-03
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-11
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/astronomer/3155b7a1-11f4-47d5-9243-46c5ba7f2e80

## Job description

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](http://www.astronomer.io).

About this role: As an Airflow Reliability Engineer on the Customer Reliability Engineering (CRE) team at Astronomer, you will have the opportunity to become an Apache Airflow expert, learning directly from leaders of the Airflow project. You’ll provide Apache Airflow expertise directly to customers to help them make the best possible use of our managed Airflow service.

CRE is Astronomer’s support team. Because our customers are sophisticated organizations who need and expect high levels of expertise to help them keep mission critical uses of Apache Airflow working consistently, we look a little different from most support teams. Nearly every ticket you will work requires an intersection of strong technical knowledge and customer empathy to understand what the customer needs and how to get them there. Every day is a new challenge and a new thing to learn. When you learn a new piece of technology, are you aiming not just to get started but to become the expert? Do you listen to the plumber when they tell you what is wrong with the pipes? Are you the kind of person who takes an MIT OpenCourseWare course and actually finishes it? Then this role could be for you.

This role requires a mandatory in-person interview as part of the interview process.

What you get to do:

- Learn and build expertise across several software engineering disciplines, including:
- Airflow and data engineering
- Kubernetes
- Cloud Engineering
- Gain exposure to the big picture; learn about product, engineering, customer relationship management, and more.
- Solve challenging Airflow problems for our customers. From optimizing configuration to identifying world-first Airflow bugs, you’ll see it all here.
- Spend up to 20% of your time on side projects that contribute to Astronomer’s overall success, such as contributing to the open-source Airflow repository or developing Astronomer’s internal monitoring and alerting systems built on Airflow.
- Work on a modern, sophisticated, cloud-native product that customers use to connect to dozens of other systems. Gain depth and breadth of learning!
- Work directly with our customers’ data engineers, system admins, DevOps teams, and management.
- Provide feedback from your experience that can shape the direction of the Airflow project.
- Own the customer experience, working directly with customers to prioritize and solve issues, meet SLAs, and provide “white glove” guidance on the path to production.
- Participate remotely within a fully distributed team.
- Help maintain 24x7 coverage through a specified 6-hour pager period during your work day.
- Participate in paid on-call rotation for weekend coverage.

What you bring to the role:

- Data Engineering background
- 4 years of experience with Python
- 1 year of experience in Airflow administration and DAG creation
- Experience with Kubernetes/Docker/Containers
- Experience working with a distributed system with any major cloud provider (AWS, GCP, Azure)
- Problem-solving and troubleshooting abilities
- Ability to work well with autonomy and independence
- Strong written and verbal communication for connecting with our customers over our ticketing system and through Zoom
- Experience mentoring junior team members

Bonus points if you have:

- Contributions to open-source projects
- Customer Support experience
- Familiarity with SQL and PostgreSQL
- Experience with Databricks, Snowflake, Redshift, dbt, or other similar data engineering tools

The estimated total compensation for this role ranges from $125,000 - $130,000 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.

#LI-Fulltime #LI-Remote

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.

## About Astronomer

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Astronomer provides the leading enterprise platform for Apache Airflow, enabling organizations to build, run, and observe mission-critical data pipelines for analytics, AI, and agentic workflows.
- **Entity Type**: Private (funded, Series C)
- **Headquarters**: New York, New York, United States (global team across 4 continents, 20+ countries)
- **Founded**: 2018
- **Founders**: Not publicly listed on primary sources (founded by a team of Airflow experts)

## Core Business
- **Primary Industry/Industries**: Data infrastructure, data orchestration, AI infrastructure
- **Target Customers**: B2B, Enterprise (Fortune 500 companies including Visa, Datadog, American Express, Expedia; 900+ enterprises total)
- **Mission/Purpose**: To build the infrastructure layer that powers the agentic era, making production-grade data orchestration scalable and observable for the world's leading enterprises.

## Products & Services
- **Astro (The Astro Platform)**: A unified enterprise platform for Apache Airflow. Includes a hardened runtime, an agent-based executor (Astro Executor), and an optimization layer for managing health and resources across any major cloud. Features include zero-downtime upgrades, deployments as code (GitOps), native data observability, and AI-powered root cause analysis.
- **Otto**: An AI agent built specifically for Apache Airflow. It writes DAGs, investigates failures, plans upgrades, and learns from a team's private memory and Astronomer's proprietary expertise.
- **Astro CLI & Astro IDE**: Tools for local and remote development, allowing teams to run Airflow locally or develop in a browser with no setup overhead.
- **Astronomer's Open Source Stewardship**: The company is the commercial steward of Apache Airflow, with 10 PMC members on staff and having driven every Airflow release since 2018.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed (Private company)
- **Key Metric**: Total Funding of $379.5M across 17 rounds; Annual Revenue of $35.0M (estimated by third-party data).
- **Notable Investors/Partners**: Investors include Insight Partners, Redpoint, and others (specific lead investors for Series C not detailed in search results). Key customers include Visa, Datadog, American Express, and Expedia.
- **Growth Signals**: 900+ enterprise customers; 80K+ organizations use Apache Airflow globally; headcount grew +1181.9% year-over-year to 445 employees; 30M+ monthly downloads of Airflow; 22 open roles as of the search date.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Deep Airflow Expertise**: Astronomer is the commercial steward of Apache Airflow, with 10 PMC members and a history of driving every major release since 2018. This gives them unparalleled insight and influence over the core technology.
- **Purpose-Built for Enterprise**: Astro is the only platform built specifically for Airflow at scale, offering features like zero-downtime upgrades, a hardened runtime, and an agent-based executor that handles higher concurrency and automatic failure recovery.
- **AI-Native Orchestration**: Their product Otto is the only AI agent built for Airflow, and their infrastructure is designed to support production-grade AI and agentic workflows, not just data pipelines.
- **Native Observability**: Integrated data observability, task-level lineage, and AI-powered root cause analysis eliminate the need for separate monitoring tools.

## Strategic Focus
- **Agentic Era Infrastructure**: Astronomer is pivoting to become the "orchestration layer for the agentic era," believing that every AI initiative depends on reliable data pipelines. They are building the context layer that allows enterprises to run agentic AI in production.
- **Continued Airflow Innovation**: They remain committed to advancing Apache Airflow as the industry standard for orchestration, while simultaneously building proprietary features (like Otto) on top.
- **Global Expansion & Hiring**: With a globally distributed team and 22 open roles, they are aggressively hiring across engineering, sales, and GTM to capture the growing demand for AI-driven data orchestration.

## Why Work Here
- **High-Impact Work**: "Every Fortune 500 AI initiative, every real-time analytics platform, every decision-making system that matters — it all starts with pipelines." Employees work on infrastructure that powers the world's most critical data and AI systems.
- **Open Source Leadership**: As stewards of Apache Airflow, engineers contribute to a project used by millions of developers and 80K+ organizations.
- **Collaborative Culture**: "Engineering, product, sales, marketing, and customer success operate as one team. Handoff culture doesn't exist here." The company emphasizes collaboration without politics.
- **Work Environment**: HQ in NYC with offices globally. Some roles are in-office, others are flexible. The team is distributed across 4 continents and 20+ countries.
- **Perks**: Top-tier health coverage (little to no cost), unlimited PTO (with a stated culture of actually using it), generous parental leave, annual wellness day off, wellness programs, and disability/life insurance.
- **Engineering Culture**: The engineering team focuses on reliability, iterative shipping, and writing about hard problems. They build infrastructure, tooling, and platform features for production-grade data orchestration.

## Sources
1. [astronomer.io](https://www.astronomer.io/)
2. [astronomer.io/about-us](https://www.astronomer.io/about-us/)
3. [astronomer.io/careers](https://www.astronomer.io/careers/)
4. [linkedin.com/company/astronomer](https://www.linkedin.com/company/astronomer)
5. [jobs.ashbyhq.com/astronomer](https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/astronomer)

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