Customer Reliability Engineer - Infra

Astronomer designed Astro, a modern data orchestration platform, powered by Apache Airflow™. Astro enables companies to place Apache Airflow at the core of their data operations, providing ease of use, scalability, and enterprise-grade security, to ensure the reliable delivery of mission-critical data pipelines.

We’re a globally-distributed and rapidly growing venture-backed team of learners, innovators and collaborators. Our mission is to build an Enterprise-grade product that makes it easy for data teams at Fortune 500’s and startups alike to adopt Apache Airflow. As a member of our team, you will be at the forefront of the industry as we strive to deliver the world's data.

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:

The Astronomer Customer Reliability Engineering (CRE) team is responsible for the success of our customers' usage of our managed Airflow service. The CREs are responsible for operating, monitoring, and maintaining the platform to ensure availability, predictability, and reliable operations.

As an infrastructure specialist within the team, you will learn to become an expert on the reliability of Kubernetes and the underlying cloud infrastructure on all 3 public clouds (AWS, Azure, and GCP). Our CRE team ensures production environments are available, predictable, and reliable for our customers. You will create strong relationships with customers and help them achieve their reliability goals. 

This role is well suited to candidates early in their careers, or if you are currently working outside the software industry.

We do not expect you to have a lot of preexisting knowledge with our toolset, but you will need beyond to be comfortable working in a terminal and have a working knowledge and intuition about Linux and networking. For instance, you should know what an IP Address is, know how to “cat” and “ls -ah”, and be comfortable reading a traceback and looking up the error codes. 

When you learn a new piece of technology, are you aiming not just for getting started but becoming the expert? Do you listen to the plumber when they tell you what was wrong with the pipes? Do you know how your router works? Are you the kind of person who takes an MIT Opencourseware course and actually finishes it? Then this role could be for you.

This position includes a requirement to work from 9AM to 3PM EST, Monday to Friday. Your remaining work time is flexible.

What you get to do:

• Learn and build expertise across several software engineering disciplines, including:

  • Kubernetes

  • Cloud engineering

  • Cloud networking

• Gain exposure to the big picture; learn about product, engineering, customer relationship management, and more.

• Spend up to 25% 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 Astronomer’s products

• Own the customer experience, working directly with customers to prioritize and solve issues and meet SLAs.

• Participate remotely within a fully distributed team. Approximately 2-4 in-person events per year.

• 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:

• Motivation to learn

• Commitment to excellence

• Problem-solving and troubleshooting abilities

• Willingness to identify and own problems through the full lifecycle, from vague problem to delivered solution

• Excellent written and verbal communication for connecting with our customers over our ticketing system and through Zoom

• Demonstrable Linux familiarity

• 2 years of professional experience (does not need to be software related)

Bonus points if you have:

• Previous experience working directly with customers (internal or external)

• Experience with DevOps

• Experience with Kubernetes/Docker/Containers

• Contributions to open-source projects

• Experience managing a distributed system with any major cloud provider (AWS, GCP, Azure)

• Experience with Splunk or Prometheus

The salary for this role is $110,000, along with an equity component.

#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.  Astronomer is a remote-first company.