Remote CRE Engineer at Astronomer - USA Remote — Columbus
Traveler-Friendly Insight
Remote-First, But With On-Call Constraints
This role is explicitly fully remote and distributed — a strong foundation for location-independent work. However, the on-call rotation for weekend coverage is a meaningful constraint for nomads. Your availability during weekends must be guaranteed, which limits spontaneous travel to locations with unreliable internet or significant timezone misalignment.
Timezone Considerations: Although no specific timezone is stated, the role targets US-based candidates. Customer SLAs and incident response likely favor US business hours (Eastern to Pacific). Nomads in Western Europe (e.g., Lisbon, UTC+1) may manage overlap during afternoon hours, but Southeast Asia (e.g., Bangkok, UTC+7) would create serious on-call challenges during US business hours.
Salary vs. Nomad Cost of Living:
- Lisbon, Portugal: ~$2,500–$3,500/mo cost of living — $125K USD annual (~$10,400/mo) leaves excellent surplus.
- Medellín, Colombia: ~$1,500–$2,200/mo — highly favorable, with a growing digital nomad visa program.
- Bangkok, Thailand: ~$1,500–$2,500/mo — affordable, but timezone mismatch with US customers is the key risk.
No explicit coworking, equipment stipend, or travel budget is mentioned. Visa-wise, US-only hiring limits options — you'd need to maintain US tax residency while traveling. Look for destinations with digital nomad visas compatible with US income (e.g., Portugal's D8, Colombia's digital nomad visa).
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?
Does this role require on-call availability?
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Do I need prior Apache Airflow experience to apply?
