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Salary: USD 172,000 - 242,000 / annual
Prefect is hiring a Senior Backend Engineer to join the Prefect Cloud team and help scale the platform from millions to billions of tasks per day. You'll own meaningful distributed systems including orchestration, APIs, data paths, and services that keep the platform reliable at scale.
The role focuses on applying query-engine and data-processing expertise to how work is planned, executed, partitioned, moved, and observed across the platform. You'll bring strong technical judgment to ambiguous problems, deciding when to prototype versus harden solutions and making tradeoffs visible to stakeholders.
You'll work directly from product and customer context in an environment without a dedicated PM for every project—this is a self-starter role where you shape the problem, not just implement tickets. You'll use AI-powered development tools effectively while maintaining strong independent judgment, and lead operationally mature work: writing maintainable code, building for reliability, participating in on-call and incident response, and continuously improving the systems you own.
You'll raise the technical bar for the team through design feedback, code review, mentoring, and clear written communication.
Required: Senior-level backend or systems engineering experience 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 (e.g., DataFusion, ClickHouse, Trino, DuckDB, Velox, Spark, Flink, Materialize). 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 similar). Strong product instincts and comfort in a small, fast-moving, low-process environment. Curiosity, self-direction, and a pattern of expanding ownership. Effective use of AI-powered engineering tools with judgment to use them as force multipliers. Able to communicate tradeoffs clearly and bring other engineers along through review and design work. Full-stack or product engineering exposure is a bonus.
Compensation varies by location: SF Bay Area & NYC Metro $194k–$242k; DC, Boston, LA, Seattle $176k–$221k; Denver, Chicago, Atlanta, and other US metros $172k–$214k. Benefits include equity stock options, 401(k) with 5% immediate match, unlimited PTO, medical/dental/vision, generous parental leave, life insurance, disability, and $800/month remote work stipend.
