Staff Platform Engineer - Prefect

Prefect builds automation for an unpredictable world.

In August 2026, Prefect and Dagster joined forces to build the next generation of automation infrastructure. Today, our ecosystem includes Dagster, Prefect, and FastMCP. Our open-source and commercial products are trusted by Fortune 500 companies, data innovators, and high-growth technology companies around the world.

We’re a remote-first team that values high standards, ownership, and thoughtful collaboration.

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.

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.
• 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
• 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