I'd say give Temporal (https://temporal.io) a look, but there are a lot of options (https://github.com/meirwah/awesome-workflow-engines).

Seconding Temporal, it is definitely a second-gen workflow platform with approaches that make many Airflow frustrations nonexistent.

In particular, workflows are extremely durable, they can easily just sit indefinitely waiting on a condition and you can redeploy workers whenever, and workflows will resume exactly where they were.

Wow, that looks cool. Especially since the way of defining things in code looks pretty first-class.

Shameless self-promotion: I built Eventline (see my profile) precisely because I just wanted to schedule and run code in various environments, manually or in reaction to various events, without the complexity that goes with specialized tools.

It gives you a pretty flexible job system, identities (secrets), monitoring, notifications, a web interface, a command line tool and a HTTP API. You can build lots of things above it.

Do you have specific use cases in mind ?

AWS Simple Workflows or Azure Logic Apps are both services that let you define S2S workflows however you like without any particular bias to CI/CD or business operations.

If you want to go even lower level, a framework like DTFx lets you define long-running, distributed and resilient orchestrations in code:

https://github.com/Azure/durabletask

Have you seen https://github.com/flyteorg/flyte? It's a data, ML and infrastructure orchestrator. (btw, I'm a Flyte engineer)

Bonus points for having a Scala SDK!

Argo Workflows

More like a SaaS that I can use without setting up my own infrastructure. I guess one could turn Argo Workflows into such an SaaS.