---
title: 'Senior Software Engineer - Build, NYC at Astronomer'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-engineer-build-nyc-astronomer-new-york-7b4c04fsm35e'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-11'
---

# Senior Software Engineer - Build, NYC at Astronomer

- **Company:** Astronomer
- **Location:** New York, NY
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-08-26
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-11
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/astronomer/3c72cd98-3493-4d30-8897-dc5e836db67e

## 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

Apache Airflow is one of the most popular open-source data platform tools. It powers the data platforms at nearly every large company and fast-growing startups: Airbnb, Uber, OpenAI, Anthropic, Nike, Capital One, Disney all use Airflow extensively. At Astronomer, we’re the largest contributors to the project and are building commercial products around Airflow to make it easier to use, run, and scale.

We’re in a unique position: as the company behind Apache Airflow, we see data as it moves across entire organizations—from raw ingestion to production dashboards, machine learning models, and AI products. Leveraging this vantage point, our R&D team is developing a global context layer for data—an intelligence layer that powers search and discovery, code generation for data and analytics, and automated root cause analysis. LLMs are already quite good at writing Python and SQL code against data platforms; we think this context layer will give them the metadata necessary for data practitioners everywhere to use LLMs effectively.

As a Software Engineer on this team, you’ll help design and build this foundation and the applications around it. You’ll work on some of the hardest and most exciting challenges in data—search, information retrieval, and AI for data pracitioners—while collaborating with a small, highly skilled team that values velocity, creativity, and impact. This role sits at the intersection of applied research, software engineering, and product: we think it takes someone who can work across the stack to build, release, and scale products successfully in this space.

Hybrid Work Model: For this role, you will embrace a flexible hybrid work model with at least 3 days per week in our New York City office.

What you get to do:

- Shape the future of AI for data engineering - build intelligent systems that understand, reason about, and optimize the flow of data across entire organizations.
- Design and engineer the brain of Astronomer’s context layer, crafting components that power data modeling, semantic search, retrieval, and code generation.
- Push the boundaries of applied AI - experiment with LLMs, embeddings, and cutting-edge retrieval techniques to create developer tools that deliver insights to you and our customers.
- Turn research into reality - work side by side with R&D and product teams to bring early AI concepts to life in the product experience.
- Solve high-impact information retrieval and search challenges at a global scale, leveraging Astronomer’s unparalleled visibility into data pipelines across industries.
- Influence the technical vision and architecture for the next generation of AI-driven data products.
- Represent Astronomer in the community - through open-source contributions, technical talks, and publications that showcase our leadership in AI and data innovation.

What you bring to the role:

- 5-8 years of software engineering experience with Python or Go
- Empathy for users, and a deep interest in improving the workflows of data professionals.
- Familiarity with early-stage product development; comfortable working with ambiguity in a fast-changing field.
- Experience with LLMs, vector databases, embeddings, or other applied AI areas—or a strong desire to dive in.
- A creative, experimental mindset: you enjoy exploring uncharted areas, validating hypotheses, and learning through iteration.
- Strong collaboration and communication skills—you can explain complex systems clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.
- A collaborative approach and comfort working in an evolving, research-driven environment where ideas move quickly.

Bonus points if you have:

- A passion for AI systems for data, developer tools, or machine learning infrastructure.
- Familiarity with Apache Airflow or other orchestration tools.
- Demonstrated contributions to open source projects.
- Experience in search, IR, or large-scale data infrastructure.
- Exposure to early-stage startups or R&D organizations where ambiguity is the norm.
- Experience building out agentic systems on top of frontier models.

The estimated total compensation for this role ranges from $210,000 - $250,000 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-Hybrid

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)

## Other roles at Astronomer

- [Customer Reliability Engineer (Airflow)](https://feeny.ai/job/customer-reliability-engineer-airflow-astronomer-united-states-1w670pzygeqd) — United States
- [Enterprise Account Executive, (San Francisco Bay Area remote)](https://feeny.ai/job/enterprise-account-executive-san-francisco-bay-area-remote-astronomer-united-ftq02dad1mwy) — United States
- [Senior Customer Reliability Engineer, Infrastructure - Hyderabad, India](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-customer-reliability-engineer-infrastructure-hyderabad-india-astronomer-d7xvsbk3bj61) — Hyderabad, India
- [Sales Development Representative (London - hybrid)](https://feeny.ai/job/sales-development-representative-london-hybrid-astronomer-london-rqbskw7zx961) — London, United Kingdom
- [Senior Software Engineer, Core Platform](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-software-engineer-core-platform-astronomer-new-york-fchfq15nsq89) — New York, NY
- [Enterprise Account Executive](https://feeny.ai/job/enterprise-account-executive-astronomer-munich-5txn9fa0kphx) — Munich, Germany
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- [Principal Software Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/principal-software-engineer-astronomer-new-york-qv5ba75rw9k5) — New York, NY
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