Staff Platform Engineer

Prefect builds and operates resilient, Pythonic orchestration and MCP platforms -- Prefect OSS, Prefect Cloud, FastMCP OSS, and Horizon -- used for mission-critical workloads.

Our Vision: Prefect will define automation for the context era.

Our Mission: Curate an intelligent context layer that delivers the right information at the right time.

Our remote first company is singularly focused on this vision and mission, and every team member directly contributes to their advancement.

We've carefully created a supportive, high-performance culture - the operating system of our company - that empowers our team to do the best work of their careers and achieve their personal and professional aspirations.

Our company operates both open-source and commercial offerings, partnering with Fortune 500 companies, data innovators, and fast-growing digitally native startups. We are looking for folks who want to join a remote-first team #LI-Remote to continue building an equally amazing company, product, and developer community.

Role Summary

We're looking for a staff platform engineer to join the Prefect Cloud team and help us build and scale the next generation agentic orchestration platform.

We’re looking for candidates who have experience operating large scale production systems.

You'll report to Zach Angell, Director of Engineering for Prefect Cloud.

What You'll Do

• Establish strategies for maintaining a high quality of service, including identifying appropriate service-level indicators and defining suitable error budgets

• Bring strong technical judgment to ambiguous problems, including when to prototype, when to harden, and how to make tradeoffs visible.

• Lead operationally mature work: write maintainable code, build for reliability, participate in on-call and incident response, and improve the systems you own over time.

• Proactively identify opportunities to improve the user experience, both for customers and internal stakeholders, through projects covering performance engineering, adopting observability tools, and improving automation

• Raise the technical bar for the team through design feedback, code review, mentoring, and clear written communication.

• Use AI-powered development tools effectively in planning, implementation, review, testing, and iteration while maintaining strong independent judgment.

Your Qualifications

• Experience operating and optimizing large-scale distributed systems in production, including tools and techniques like observability and self-healing, to ensure that we can operate our systems reliably and in a sustainable way

• Expertise managing production services in cloud environments, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

• Experience with monitoring tools such as DataDog, Grafana, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry

• Experience operating production systems in a high-growth startup environment

• Familiarity with declarative techniques for managing production infrastructure safely with modern Infrastructure as Code tools, such as Kubernetes and Terraform

What You'll Get in Return

Base Salary Ranges:

• San Francisco Bay Area & NYC Metro: $248,000-$309,000

• Washington D.C., Boston, LA Metro, Seattle: $224,000-$288,000

• Denver, Chicago, Atlanta, & all other U.S. metros: $214,000-$267,000

Actual base salary within each range depends on the candidate's location, experience, and qualifications. Please keep in mind that equity and benefits are not included in the range provided above. Your recruiter can share more about the salary range for your preferred location during the hiring process.

Perks and Benefits:

• Remote-first team with flexible-first culture

• Equity Stock Options

• 401(k) with 5% company match, vesting immediately

• Unlimited PTO

• Medical, Dental and Vision insurance

• Generous Parental Leave

• Life Insurance and Disability benefits

• USD 800/month remote work stipend

Belongingness at Prefect:

Belongingness at Prefect is our commitment to ensuring mutual power, access, and opportunity among all groups and individuals who make up our community. We operationalize belongingness through actions large and small on a daily basis, but always with the goal that all groups and individuals can contribute as their most authentic self to the evolution of our product, our team, and our community.

Belongingness is also our commitment to bridge with individuals or groups not yet established in our community, acknowledge differences in a way that affirms distinct identities, and allows for a new, more expansive group identity to form.

Equal Opportunity at Prefect:

Prefect is an equal opportunity employer and encourages applications from people of all backgrounds. All applicants will be considered for employment without attention to race, religion, color, sex (including pregnancy, sexual orientation and gender identity/expression), national origin, disability or any other status protected under applicable federal, state, or local laws.

Brad is a real live person (👋🏻) and is looking forward to learning more about you through your application.