Director of Reliability Engineering

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. To learn more, visit www.astronomer.io.

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:

We are seeking a highly experienced and visionary Director of Reliability Engineering to lead our global reliability initiatives. This will be a central role in our organization, which supports critical services for companies around the world in every industry.

This strategic leadership role is responsible for defining, driving, and evolving operational excellence, platform reliability, and automation at scale across our cloud-native infrastructure. You will lead, mentor, and grow high-performing SRE teams, collaborate cross-functionally, and play a critical role in ensuring a seamless and resilient customer experience for many of the world’s largest companies.

What you get to do:

• 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.

What you bring to the role:

• 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
  

Bonus points if you have:

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, or a related field.

• Experience managing vendor relationships and partnerships.

• Comfortable presenting to executive stakeholders in high-stakes environments.

• Proven ability to scale operations during rapid business or organizational growth.

• Strong analytical mindset with the ability to evaluate trade-offs between reliability, speed, and innovation.

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.

#LI-Hybrid

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.