← Astronomer
Astronomer role-play cheat sheet
For the mock cold call at the end of most SDR interviews.
What they sell, in one line
A managed cloud service for building, running and monitoring data pipelines using Apache Airflow.
Who you'd be calling
Data engineering leads, heads of data platform, and VPs of Data at mid-size to large companies.
Your opener
“Hi [Name], this is [Your Name] from Astronomer. I'm calling because teams running Airflow often tell me they spend more time maintaining it than building with it. Is that true for your team?”
Problems you solve for them
- Running Airflow yourself takes constant upkeep and engineering time
- Pipelines fail quietly and are hard to debug
- Scaling data and AI pipelines reliably is hard
- Upgrades and security work pull engineers off real projects
Discovery questions to ask
- How are you running Airflow today: self-hosted or managed?
- How much engineering time goes into keeping pipelines healthy?
- What happens when a pipeline fails overnight?
Objections they'll throw at you
“I'm really busy right now.”
→ No problem. Can I try you again tomorrow or Thursday for two minutes?
“We're not interested.”
→ Got it. Before I go, who looks after your Airflow setup, and is it a big part of their week?
“We already use something for this.”
→ Makes sense. Is that Airflow you host yourselves, or a managed service, and what's the biggest headache with it?
“Send me an email.”
→ Happy to. Is your team on Airflow already, so I can send something that fits?
Competitors worth knowing
AWS MWAA, Google Cloud Composer, Prefect, Dagster
Interview tips for this company
- Learn the basics: Airflow is open-source software that schedules and runs data tasks in order.
- Know that Astronomer is a major contributor to Apache Airflow, which is a credibility point with buyers.
Written from public information about Astronomer to help you practice. Ask an insider what their role play looked like; it's the best prep there is.