Staff Platform Engineer: Scale-Driven Automation Leader

Dagster Labs; San Francisco (CA); Remote; USD 248,000 - 309,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote-first culture

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’ll operate large-scale production systems and report to the Director of Engineering for Prefect Cloud, Zach Angell.

The role focuses on maintaining high service quality, making strong technical judgments, and leading operational initiatives while improving user experience across customers and internal stakeholders in a remote-first

Qualifications

• Experience operating and optimizing large-scale distributed systems in production, including 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 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

Responsibilities

• 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

Skills

Distributed systems ops

Cloud platforms

Observability

Startup experience

IaC practices

Tools

DataDog

Grafana

Prometheus

OpenTelemetry

Kubernetes

Terraform

Job description

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’ll operate large-scale production systems and report to the Director of Engineering for Prefect Cloud, Zach Angell.

The role focuses on maintaining high service quality, making strong technical judgments, and leading operational initiatives while improving user experience across customers and internal stakeholders in a remote-first