Senior Engineering Manager

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 700 of the world's leading enterprises, Astronomer lets businesses do more with their data. To learn more, visit www.astronomer.io.

Your background may be unconventional; as long as you have the essential qualifications, we encourage you to apply. While having "bonus" qualifications makes for a strong candidate, Astronomer values diverse experiences. Many of us at Astronomer haven't followed traditional career paths, and we welcome it if yours hasn't either.

About this role

As a Senior Engineering Manager at Astronomer, you will play a pivotal role in leading and guiding a team of talented engineers bringing commercial value to Apache Airflow OSS. Your primary goal will be to foster a high-performing and innovative engineering culture, ensuring that our products meet the highest standards of quality and efficiency.

In this role, you will collaborate extensively with leadership across various departments, including Engineering, Product Management, Customer Support and Field engineering. It's a great opportunity to work on some of the most challenging problems in data orchestration while contributing to the development of Astronomer’s next-generation product suite.

What you get to do:

• Lead our globally distributed Airflow Infrastructure team to deliver an exceptional Apache Airflow experience, bridging the gap between open-source software and our commercial initiatives to set new industry standards in data orchestration.

• Provide technical mentorship to a team of skilled software engineers, offering guidance and support to foster their growth, enhance their skills, and drive their professional development

• Oversee the entire lifecycle of engineering projects, from initial concept and design to development, testing, deployment, and ongoing support.

• Collaborate closely with the Engineering Tech Lead, Product Managers, Engineering Leadership, and other key stakeholders to ensure engineering projects are aligned with company objectives and customer needs.

• Ensure projects are on track, resources are allocated efficiently, and deadlines are met.

• Collaborate closely with our support and customer facing teams to gather insights on customer issues and feedback, and integrate them back into the product.

• Drive efforts to identify and address performance bottlenecks, ensuring the Airflow infrastructure system can handle high-throughput workloads while maintaining low latency and resource efficiency.

• Work with the team to implement comprehensive logging, monitoring, and alerting strategies, ensuring end-to-end visibility into system health and performance, enabling rapid identification and resolution of issues.

• Take a proactive approach in identifying and managing technical debt, including driving towards a sustainable long term technical architecture.

What you bring to the role:

• Deep prior experience in software engineering, with multiple years of experience in a people management role.

• Strong technical background in distributed systems, data engineering, cloud computing, and technologies like Kubernetes and Docker.

• Ability to identify and solve complex technical challenges, balancing immediate needs with long-term solutions that ensure system stability, scalability, and performance.

• Proven track record in setting clear expectations and goals for the engineering team, delivering high-quality software products reliably and on time.

• Demonstrated ability to develop detailed project execution plans, including the proactive identification and effective communication of potential risks.

• Ability to work cross-functionally with product managers, stakeholders, and external customers to align technical solutions with business goals, product vision, and user needs.

• Proven ability to drive operational excellence by implementing monitoring, incident management, and continuous improvement processes, ensuring systems run efficiently and reliably at scale.

• Some flexibility in working hours to accommodate for the distributed nature of the team.

Bonus points if you have:

• 5+ years of experience managing or directing software engineering teams

• Proven experience in managing distributed teams, highlighting your ability to lead and collaborate effectively in a remote work environment.

• Contributions to open-source projects or a notable presence in the tech community, demonstrated through talks, articles, or blogs.

• Some previous working knowledge or experience with Airflow.

• Working knowledge on tech stacks based on Python/Golang.

The estimated salary for this role ranges from $240,000 - $275,000 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-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.  Astronomer is a remote-first company.