Senior Design Engineer

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.

About this role:

We’re in a unique position at Astronomer: as the company behind Apache Airflow, we see data as it moves across entire organizations - from raw ingestion to production dashboards, machine learning models, and AI products. Leveraging this vantage point, our R&D team recently released an AI-empowered IDE for data - an intelligence layer that powers search and discovery, and code generation for data engineering and analytics. LLMs are already quite good at writing Python and SQL code against data platforms; the Astro IDE gives data practitioners everywhere a better path to use LLMs effectively for their specific day-to-day use.

As a Design Engineer on the team, you’ll create designs and build the user experience for the Astro IDE, our new AI enabled software IDE built specifically for Data Engineers. The IDE poses a few interesting design challenges: it’s a simplified IDE built specifically for writing data pipelines and comes with built-in experiences around testing data pipelines. It also has an embedded code agent that has access to the user’s data platform context (tables, example queries, files, runtime information). We’re looking for someone to help scale the product from public preview and beyond, designing and building pleasant experiences around building data pipelines and interacting with agents.

Apache Airflow is one of the most popular open-source data platform tools. It powers the data platforms at nearly every large company and fast-growing startups: Airbnb, Uber, OpenAI, Anthropic, Nike, Capital One, Disney all use Airflow extensively. At Astronomer, we’re the largest contributors to the project and are building commercial products around Airflow to make it easier to use, run, and scale.

What you get to do:

• Transform design concepts into production-ready user interfaces, taking full ownership from initial idea to deployed code.

• Champion design-led experimentation through prototyping, interaction testing, and rapid iteration, contributing to the evolution of our front-end architecture and design tools.

• Deeply understand user needs by collaborating with engineering, product, and customer-facing teams to grasp the complete scope of problems you'll solve.

• Contribute early design concepts as a core part of the product ideation and proposal process for critical feature sets.

• Partner closely with product and engineering to sequence projects, deliver MVPs, make informed information architecture decisions, and uphold design standards within our codebase.

• Elevate the product experience for developers by bringing consumer-grade UX, obsessing over details, and consistently shipping incremental improvements for a cohesive and thoughtful user experience.

What you bring to the role:

• 5+ years of experience in product design or front-end engineering.

• A strong grasp of UX and accessibility principles, complemented by sophisticated visual aesthetic and taste.

• Proficiency in JavaScript (preferably Typescript + React) and CSS, including DOM manipulation.

• Empathy for users and a genuine interest in enhancing the workflows of data professionals.

• Ability to prototype quickly, iterate based on feedback, and drive towards production-ready code.

• Comfort with end-to-end UI delivery—from sketch to code to deployment—while fostering collaborative product team environments.

• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, enabling you to speak design language with designers and engineering language with developers.

• A problem-solving mindset, allowing you to weigh UX/design value against implementation cost, make trade-offs, and prioritize effectively.

• Familiarity with early-stage product development and comfort navigating ambiguity in a rapidly evolving field.

• A high standard of excellence, where you obsess over important details without striving for unattainable perfection.

Bonus points if you have:

• A passion for building AI or developer tools.

• Proficiency in Figma, including managing shared component libraries.

• Familiarity with machine learning, data science, and data engineering concepts.

• Experience with open-source communities.

The estimated salary for this role ranges from $180,000 - $220,000 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.

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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.