Senior Backend Engineer, Prefect Cloud

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 senior back-end leaning product engineer to join the Prefect Cloud team and help us scale from millions to billions of tasks per day. We’re looking for candidates who have owned large-scale distributed systems and have meaningful experience designing, building, or materially extending a query engine, analytical database, streaming system, or distributed data-processing runtime. That experience may come from systems such as DataFusion, ClickHouse, Trino or Presto, DuckDB, Velox, Spark, Flink, Materialize, or similar technologies. You'll report to Zach Angell, Director of Engineering for Prefect Cloud. What You'll Do Own meaningful distributed systems in Prefect Cloud : orchestration, APIs, data paths, and services that keep the platform reliable at scale. Apply query-engine and data-processing expertise to how we plan, execute, partition, move, and observe work across the platform. Bring strong technical judgment to ambiguous problems , including when to prototype, when to harden, and how to make tradeoffs visible. Work directly from product and customer context , including enterprise needs and GTM signal, in an environment without a dedicated PM for every project; be a self-starter who can shape the problem, not just implement a ticket. Use AI-powered development tools effectively in planning, implementation, review, testing, and iteration while maintaining strong independent judgment. 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. Raise the technical bar for the team through design feedback, code review, mentoring, and clear written communication. Your Qualifications Senior-level back-end or systems engineering experience with a record of owning large-scale distributed systems in production. Meaningful experience designing, building, or materially extending a query engine, analytical database, streaming system, or distributed data-processing runtime . Relevant work may involve query planning or optimization, physical execution and operators, distributed execution, partitioning and data movement, columnar or vectorized processing, incremental computation, resource management, or fault tolerance. Strong computer-science and distributed-systems fundamentals, with sound judgment about concurrency, consistency, performance, reliability, and failure. Able and willing to write production Python. Prior systems experience may be in Python, Rust, Go, C++, Java, or another suitable language. Strong product instincts and comfort operating in a small, fast-moving, low-process environment, including working without a dedicated PM and creating clarity from product and customer context. Curiosity, self-direction, and a pattern of expanding ownership and taking on harder problems. Effective use of AI-powered engineering tools such as Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Copilot, or comparable workflows, with the judgment to use them as force multipliers rather than substitutes for understanding. Able to communicate tradeoffs clearly in writing and discussion and bring other engineers along through review and design work. Full-stack or product engineering exposure is a bonus, especially experience shipping product-facing features from ambiguous requirements. What You'll Get in Return Base Salary Ranges (current Senior / L5 band): San Francisco Bay Area & NYC Metro: $194,000–$242,000 Washington D.C., Boston, LA Metro, Seattle: $176,000–$221,000 Denver, Chicago, Atlanta, & all other U.S. metros: $172,000–$214,000 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.