Staff Platform Engineer

Prefect builds automation for an unpredictable world. The last decade of automation was about protecting workflows from unpredictability; in the agentic era, unpredictability is the point. Our mission is to give people confidence in automated work, whether that work is a mission-critical data pipeline or a fleet of AI agents.

In August 2026, Prefect and Dagster, competitors for eight years, joined forces to build the next generation of automation infrastructure. Today, our ecosystem includes Dagster, the data platform; Prefect, the agent platform; and FastMCP, the leading open-source developer framework for the MCP ecosystem. Together, our open-source and commercial products are trusted by Fortune 500 companies, data innovators, and high-growth technology companies around the world.

We think of our culture as the operating system of the company. We’ve carefully created a supportive, high-performance environment that empowers our team to do the best work of their careers, have meaningful impact, and continue growing personally and professionally. We’re a remote-first team that values high standards, ownership, and thoughtful collaboration.

Role Summary

Were 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.

Youll report to Zach Angell, Director of Engineering for Prefect Cloud.

What Youll 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 Youll 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 candidates 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