[Hiring] Senior Design Engineer @Astronomer

Role Description

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.
• It comes with built-in experiences around testing data pipelines.
• It 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.

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.

Qualifications

• 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.

Requirements

• 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.

Benefits

• 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.

Company Description

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.