Senior Backend Engineer

About the Company

Prefect builds and operates resilient, Pythonic orchestration and MCP platforms used for mission-critical workloads. Our mission is to curate an intelligent context layer that delivers the right information at the right time.

Responsibilities

• Own meaningful distributed systems in Prefect Cloud including orchestration, APIs, data paths, and services
• Apply query-engine and data-processing expertise to work planning, execution, and observation
• Bring strong technical judgment to ambiguous problems and make tradeoffs visible
• Work directly from product and customer context to shape problems and implement solutions
• Use AI-powered development tools effectively for planning, implementation, and testing
• Lead operationally mature work including writing maintainable code and participating in on-call/incident response
• Raise the technical bar through design feedback, code review, and mentoring

Requirements

• Senior-level back-end or systems engineering experience owning large-scale distributed systems in production
• Experience designing or extending a query engine, analytical database, streaming system, or distributed data-processing runtime
• Strong computer-science and distributed-systems fundamentals (concurrency, consistency, performance)
• Ability and willingness to write production Python
• Strong product instincts and comfort in a small, fast-moving, low-process environment
• Effective use of AI-powered engineering tools like Claude Code, Cursor, or Copilot
• Strong written and verbal communication skills for discussing technical tradeoffs

Preferred Qualifications

• Full-stack or product engineering exposure
• Experience shipping product-facing features from ambiguous requirements