Staff Platform Engineer
Join Prefect as a Staff Platform Engineer to build and scale the next generation agentic orchestration platform in a remote-first environment.
Posted by employer 1 month ago
First seen on Joblaze 1 month ago
Last verified on the company career page 10 hours ago
Skills & Technologies
Role intensity
50% coding
AI in the day-to-day
Use AI-powered development tools effectively in planning, implementation, review, testing, and iteration while maintaining strong independent judgment.
Requirements
- Experience
- 5+ years
Not disclosed in this posting: visa sponsorship.
Benefits
Joblaze summary
The Staff Platform Engineer at Prefect is responsible for developing and scaling the company's next-generation orchestration platform, focusing on maintaining high service quality and improving user experience. Key skills include expertise in large-scale distributed systems, cloud environments, and observability tools, along with a strong foundation in coding and system reliability. This role is ideal for experienced engineers who thrive in high-growth startup settings and are adept at navigating complex technical challenges. Prefect emphasizes a supportive culture that fosters personal and professional growth within a remote-first team.
Joblaze insights
- Listed about a month ago — first seen on Joblaze September 3, 2026. Last confirmed on Prefect's careers page October 27, 2026.
- Salary band is above the typical range for DevOps/SRE roles (median ~$165,000).
- Starts above 62% of 52 comparable staff devops/sre roles that list Kubernetes we track (median $200,000 across 28 companies). See Kubernetes salary trends
- Kubernetes appears in 68.7% of 134 comparable staff devops/sre roles; Microsoft Azure appears in 0.7% of 134 comparable staff devops/sre roles.
Quick facts
- Is the Staff Platform Engineer role remote?
- Yes — Prefect lists this as a fully remote position.
- What's the salary range?
- Prefect lists $214,000–$309,000 for this role.
- How much experience is required?
- At least 5 years of relevant experience for this Staff Platform Engineer role.
- What's the tech stack?
- Joblaze extracted these technologies from the posting: AWS, Datadog, Google Cloud Platform, Grafana, Kubernetes, Microsoft Azure.
- What seniority level is this role?
- Prefect targets staff-level candidates for this position.
- Is this full-time or contract?
- Full-time for this Staff Platform Engineer role at Prefect.
From the original posting
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
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
Standard company text repeated across Prefect's postings is omitted here.