Staff Platform Engineer

Dagster; Northern (KY); Hybrid; USD 214,000 - 309,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote-first

Equity stock options

401(k) with 5% company match, vesting

Unlimited PTO

Medical, Dental and Vision insurance

Generous Parental Leave

Life Insurance and Disability benefits

USD 800/month remote work stipend

Job summary

Prefect is seeking a Staff Platform Engineer to join the Prefect Cloud team and help build and scale the next generation agentic orchestration platform. You will operate large-scale production systems and report to the Director of Engineering for Prefect Cloud.

You will lead reliability improvements, own on-call processes, and mentor peers while collaborating with cross-functional partners to deliver high-quality software at scale.

Qualifications

• Experience operating large-scale production distributed systems.
• Proficiency with cloud platforms (AWS/Azure/GCP).
• Hands-on experience with observability toolchains (DataDog, Grafana, Prometheus).
• Experience in high-growth startup environments.
• Familiarity with declarative infrastructure (Kubernetes, Terraform).

Responsibilities

• Lead strategies for high service quality and defining SLIs and error budgets.
• Apply strong technical judgment to prototype, harden, and trade off designs.
• Own on-call practices, incident response, and reliability improvements.
• Identify opportunities to improve user experience for customers and internal users.
• Raise the technical bar via design feedback, reviews, mentoring, and clear communication.
• Leverage AI-powered development tools while maintaining independent judgment.

Skills

Distributed systems

Cloud platforms

Observability

On-call / incident response

Mentorship

Tools

DataDog

Grafana

Prometheus

OpenTelemetry

Kubernetes

Terraform

Job description

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.

About Prefect

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

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.

Delaney is a real live person and is looking forward to learning more about you through your application.