Skip to content
AstronomerAstronomerNew York, NY

Principal Software Engineer

Provides principal-level technical leadership for a self-contained, cloud-agnostic platform that provisions and orchestrates Apache Airflow in enterprise and air-gapped environments. Requires 10+ years of software engineering experience, control-plane and API architecture expertise, Kubernetes proficiency, and strong distributed-systems design skills.

277k – 390k/yr
Hybrid10+ YOEBackend Engineering

About the role

Responsibilities

  • Own the end-to-end definition, design, and implementation of control plane and data plane services for a self-contained infrastructure platform.
  • Build resilient interconnections between control plane and data plane services.
  • Design extensible platform APIs, including data modeling, versioning, and backward compatibility for REST or gRPC interfaces.
  • Architect telemetry frameworks covering metrics, logs, and traces for platform services and provisioned Apache Airflow instances.
  • Ensure services, images, dependencies, and configurations operate across connected private clouds and isolated, zero-egress environments.
  • Provide technical leadership by translating enterprise infrastructure needs into execution roadmaps and partnering with product management and executive stakeholders.
  • Mentor senior engineers through design reviews, high-leverage code contributions, and career development.

Requirements

  • 10+ years of professional software engineering experience, including significant Staff, Senior Staff, or Principal-level experience in enterprise infrastructure, DBaaS, or private cloud organizations.
  • Experience building production-grade infrastructure control planes and customer-facing APIs.
  • Experience designing and implementing observability stacks for isolated environments.
  • Strong Kubernetes operational and architectural expertise, including custom Kubernetes Operators, CRDs, Helm deployments, and the Kubernetes API.
  • Systems design experience spanning AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, Red Hat OpenShift, and bare-metal on-premises infrastructure.
  • Expert software development skills in languages such as Go, Python, or TypeScript.
  • Deep knowledge of distributed state stores, concurrency, and network security patterns.
  • Exceptional written and oral technical communication skills, including technical one-pagers and RFCs.
  • Ability to present to executive leadership and engage strategic enterprise clients.

Compensation and Benefits

  • Estimated salary range: $277,000–$390,000, based on leveling and geography.
  • Equity component.
  • Comprehensive benefits package.

Skills

Kuberneteskubernetes operatorscustom resource definitionsHelmkubernetes apiGoPythonTypeScriptPrometheusOpenTelemetryGrafanaapache airflowAWSGCPAzure

Similar roles

Backend Engineering jobs
Ironclad

Principal Engineer

IroncladSan Francisco, CA

Principal Engineer architects and evolves core platform for AI-powered contract intelligence, builds scalable SaaS systems with LLMs and semantic search, leads cross-functional teams, and mentors engineers. Requires 10+ years experience in large-scale distributed systems and AI product delivery.

285k – 315k/yrHybrid10+ YOEBackend Engineering
Snowflake

Principal Software Engineer I - Metadata

SnowflakeMenlo Park, CA

Designs and builds fault-tolerant, scalable distributed systems for Snowflake's metadata, Snowgrid, and data sharing features. Requires 15+ years experience, strong CS fundamentals, Java fluency, and ability to mentor juniors while solving performance and scale challenges.

264k – 380k/yrOn-site15+ YOEBackend Engineering
Snowflake

Principal Software Engineer - Snowflake Intelligence

SnowflakeMenlo Park, CA

Leads technical vision and architecture for Snowflake Intelligence, tackling agentic reasoning, NL-to-SQL, and enterprise RAG. Requires 10+ years software engineering with 3+ years LLM deployment at scale, deep AI expertise, and principal-level impact.

264k – 380k/yrOn-site10+ YOEBackend Engineering
Snowflake

Principal Software Engineer I - Snowhouse Foundation

SnowflakeMenlo Park, CA

Leads design and implementation of highly available distributed platforms and pipelines for Snowflake's petabyte-scale data warehouse. Requires 15+ years in distributed systems and data infrastructure, with cloud expertise in AWS, Azure, GCP.

264k – 380k/yrOn-site15+ YOEBackend Engineering
Airbnb

Principal Software Engineer, Performance

AirbnbUnited States

Leads Airbnb's performance engineering strategy across full stack including CPU/GPU utilization, backend efficiency, and ML infra. Builds profiling tools, influences company-wide SLOs, and mentors engineers with 12+ years experience in high-scale systems.

292k – 365k/yrRemote12+ YOEBackend Engineering