Senior Backend Engineer, Prefect Cloud

About the role

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.

Pay

• 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

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