Senior Backend Engineer

Role Description

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.

• 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.

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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

Requirements

• Experience with large-scale distributed systems.
• Proficiency in designing and building query engines or analytical databases.
• Strong programming skills in Python or similar languages.
• Ability to work independently in a remote-first environment.
• Experience with AI-powered engineering tools.

Benefits

• 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
• 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