Customer Reliability Engineer – Infrastructure

Remote from: USA
Salary, yearly, USD: 125,000 - 130,000
Department: Technical Support
Employment type: Full Time,
Job posted: 25 Jun 2026
Apply before: 25 Jul 2026
Experience level: Midweight
Views / Applies: 115 / 25

About company

About Astronomer

The Apache Airflow Company

Computer Software
2015

Actively Hiring

AI Summary

Astronomer is seeking a Customer Reliability Engineer (CRE) to ensure the reliability and success of their managed Apache Airflow service. This role involves operating and maintaining cloud infrastructure and Kubernetes clusters, responding to incidents, and working directly with customers to troubleshoot issues. The ideal candidate has 5+ years of experience with large-scale cloud infrastructures, strong Kubernetes skills, and a customer-facing mindset. This is a fully remote position with on-call rotation, offering an opportunity to impact customer experience and contribute to product improvements.

Role DNA

Job Complexity

Easy Hard

Pace & Pressure

Relaxed Fast-paced

Autonomy Level

Guided Full Ownership

Communication Load

Independent Highly Collaborative

AI Insight This role requires a high level of technical expertise in Kubernetes, cloud infrastructure, and incident response, along with strong customer communication skills, making it challenging but not the hardest level.

Salary Analysis

AI Insight The offered salary range of $125,000-$130,000 is competitive and aligns well with the market for a Customer Reliability Engineer role with 5+ years of experience. The median of $127,500 is slightly above the market median for similar roles, reflecting the specialized skills required.

Key Skills

Kubernetes Cloud Infrastructure Incident Response Customer Success Python DevOps Monitoring and Alerting Distributed Systems Linux Site Reliability Engineering

Cover Letter Sample

Dear Hiring Manager,

I am writing to express my strong interest in the Customer Reliability Engineer - Infrastructure role at Astronomer. With over 5 years of experience managing large-scale cloud infrastructures and a deep expertise in Kubernetes, I am confident in my ability to ensure the reliability and success of your managed Airflow service. I have a proven track record of incident response, automation, and direct customer engagement, which aligns perfectly with the responsibilities outlined in the job description.

In my previous role, I successfully maintained distributed systems across AWS and GCP, reducing incident resolution time by 30% through improved monitoring and automation. I also collaborated closely with customers to troubleshoot complex issues, ensuring high satisfaction and adherence to SLAs. My strong communication skills and technical proficiency make me an ideal fit for this customer-facing position.

I am excited about the opportunity to contribute to Astronomer's mission of empowering data teams and would welcome the chance to discuss how my skills and experience can benefit your team. Thank you for your consideration.

Sincerely,
Your Name

Possible Interview Questions

Describe your experience with Kubernetes in a production environment. How have you managed scaling and reliability?

I have worked with Kubernetes for over 3 years, managing clusters with hundreds of nodes. I implemented autoscaling using Horizontal Pod Autoscaler and cluster autoscaler, and ensured reliability through proper resource limits, readiness probes, and rolling updates. I also used Prometheus and Grafana for monitoring.

How do you approach incident response and on-call rotations? Can you give an example of a critical incident you resolved?

I follow a structured incident response process: first, stabilize the system to reduce impact, then diagnose the root cause. For example, once we had a database crash due to a memory leak; I quickly scaled up resources to restore service, then worked with the dev team to fix the leak and added monitoring alerts to prevent recurrence.

What strategies do you use to communicate technical issues to non-technical customers?

I focus on clear, jargon-free language and provide status updates in terms of impact on their business. I also use visual aids like timelines and dashboards. For example, during a latency issue, I explained the problem as 'a slowdown in data processing' and gave regular updates on recovery progress.

How would you improve the observability of a managed Airflow service?

I would start by ensuring all metrics (CPU, memory, network) are captured, along with application-specific metrics like DAG success rates and task durations. I'd implement distributed tracing for workflow steps and set up dashboards with alerts for anomaly detection. I'd also work on log aggregation for quick debugging.

Describe a time you automated a routine operational task. What was the outcome?

I automated the process of scaling Kubernetes nodes by writing a Python script that integrated with cloud APIs to adjust node groups based on usage patterns. This reduced manual intervention by 80% and improved cost efficiency by ensuring resources matched demand closely.

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.

The 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 and 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. CRE get the opportunity to interface with customers from a variety of industries across different cloud providers, and all with different expectations. Your contributions will directly impact customers’ success with using the 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 (one or all: AWS, GCP, Azure)
Strong Linux experience
Knowledge of how to operate and monitor issues for distributed systems
Previous experience in handling customers 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 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.

#LI-Fulltime

#LI-Remote

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.

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