Director of Reliability Engineering - Remote

Overview

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.

In Short

• Define and lead the strategic direction for SRE, reliability, and operational excellence across the organization.
• Collaborate with Software Engineers and Product Managers on projects that impact users and be directly responsible for service uptime.
• Own end-to-end availability and performance of key services; build automation to prevent recurrence of issues and automate responses to all non-exceptional service conditions.
• Design, write, and deliver software to improve the availability, scalability, latency, and efficiency of services.
• Champion observability, automation, and self-healing systems to proactively prevent downtime and reduce manual toil.
• Evolve and manage our incident and change management processes, including root cause analysis and postmortems.
• Drive adoption of SLOs, SLIs, and error budgets to align engineering efforts with business priorities.
• Work with operational support to manage global on-call rotations using a follow-the-sun model to ensure around-the-clock coverage.
• Support on-call culture by defining best practices for incident response, escalation policies, and operational readiness.
• Partner closely with engineering, product, security, and program management teams to improve reliability without slowing innovation.
• Cultivate a culture of continuous improvement, high accountability, and blameless incident management.
• Lead and mentor the team, establishing credibility through high-quality technical execution.
• Provide strong mentorship and leadership to grow the next generation of reliability and engineering leaders.

Requirements

• 10+ years of experience in software engineering, SRE, or DevOps roles.
• 5+ years in a technical leadership capacity, ideally in a high-growth, cloud-native SaaS environment.
• Proven success operating and scaling large-scale, distributed, mission-critical systems.
• Deep expertise in public cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP).
• Hands-on knowledge of infrastructure as code (Terraform, CloudFormation), container orchestration (Kubernetes), and observability tools (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, Splunk).
• Experience implementing and managing CI/CD pipelines and secure development practices.
• Demonstrated ability to hire, grow, and lead globally distributed SRE teams.
• Strong decision-making, communication, and cross-functional collaboration skills.

Benefits

• The estimated salary for this role ranges from $260,000 - $290,000, along with an equity component.
• This range is merely an estimate, and the width of the range reflects willingness to consider candidates with broad prior seniority.
• Actual compensation may deviate from this range based on skills, experience, and qualifications.
• Astronomer is a remote-first company.
• We value diversity and are an equal opportunity employer.