Senior CRE Engineer at Astronomer | Kubernetes & Cloud in Columbus
Career & Market Insight
Career Positioning: SRE/CRE at a High-Growth DataOps Company
This role sits at the intersection of Site Reliability Engineering, cloud infrastructure, and customer success — a niche that commands premium market rates. The $125K–$130K range is slightly below the US market median for senior SRE roles (typically $140K–$175K at comparable Series C/D SaaS companies), though equity and the breadth of exposure may compensate.
Skills You'll Build:
- Deep Kubernetes operations and custom resource management — highly transferable and in strong demand.
- Multi-cloud (AWS, GCP, Azure) infrastructure expertise at enterprise scale.
- Apache Airflow mastery — a niche skill increasingly critical in the AI/data pipeline space.
- Observability platform ownership — a rare, senior-level competency.
Green Flags: Astronomer serves 800+ enterprise clients, suggesting stable revenue and product maturity. The CRE role offers direct influence on product architecture — atypical for a reliability role and a strong career accelerator. Fully distributed culture is a positive signal for autonomy.
Red Flags to Watch: The weekend on-call requirement and customer-facing pressure can impact work-life balance. The salary band is narrow ($5K range), suggesting limited negotiation room. Candidates with SRE backgrounds specifically should negotiate at or above the stated maximum.
Ideal Career Stage: Mid-to-senior engineers looking to deepen cloud/Kubernetes expertise and move toward staff-level infrastructure or platform engineering roles.
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.
About This Role
The Astronomer Customer Reliability Engineering (CRE) team is responsible for the success of our customers' usage of our managed Airflow service. 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 focus on the reliability of the underlying cloud infrastructure and Kubernetes clusters. This entails responding to incidents either raised by a customer or from our monitoring system, then taking further steps to ensure problems are permanently resolved or monitored. As owners of the observability platform, CRE has unlimited potential to improve the reliability of the product and deliver the best possible outcome for our customers.
This role is directly customer-facing and gives exposure to very diverse problems and requirements. CREs interface with customers from a variety of industries across different cloud providers, all with different expectations. Your contributions will directly impact customers' success with Astronomer products, and you will be able to help make meaningful improvements to the customer experience.
What You Get to Do:
- Provide solutions to customers to make them successful using our products.
- Troubleshoot customer environments and engage in active triaging with customers.
- Participate in on-call rotation for weekend coverage.
- Provide feedback to the product development teams on customer needs and pain points.
- Build out our monitoring and alerting systems.
- Build and maintain automation to ensure daily operational tasks are handled as efficiently as possible.
- Help direct the architecture of the products and contribute where possible.
- 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.
- Enhance and enrich customer documentation.
- Work with the latest technology and multi-cloud implementations.
What You Bring to the Role:
- 5 years of experience, preferably with large, complex cloud infrastructures operating at scale.
- 3 years of experience with Kubernetes.
- Experience managing a production distributed system with at least one major cloud provider (AWS, GCP, and/or Azure).
- Strong Linux experience.
- Knowledge of how to operate and monitor issues for distributed systems.
- Previous experience handling customer issues (internal or external).
- Strong communication skills.
- DevOps or CI/CD experience.
- Python scripting.
- Good troubleshooting skills.
Bonus Points If You Have:
- Experience as a Site Reliability Engineer.
- Worked with Kubernetes Custom Resources.
- Depth of knowledge with Azure.
- Airflow/Big Data Orchestration experience.
- IaC (Infrastructure as Code) experience.
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.
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.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this Customer Reliability Engineer role fully remote?
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Do I need prior Apache Airflow experience to apply?
