Senior Backend Engineer, Prefect Cloud
$172,000–$242,000 year
RemoteUnited States
Job Summary
Own meaningful distributed systems in Prefect Cloud, including orchestration, APIs, data paths, and services that keep the platform reliable at scale. Apply query-engine and data-processing expertise to plan, execute, partition, move, and observe work across the platform. Bring strong technical judgment to ambiguous problems, prototyping and hardening solutions while making tradeoffs visible. Work directly from product and customer context, including enterprise needs and GTM signal, shaping the problem rather than just implementing tickets. Use AI-powered development tools effectively in planning, implementation, review, testing, and iteration while maintaining independent judgment. Lead operationally mature work by writing maintainable code, building for reliability, participating in on-call and incident response, and improving systems over time. Raise the technical bar through design feedback, code review, mentoring, and clear written communication.
Required 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 in Python, Rust, Go, C++, Java, or another suitable language
- Strong product instincts and comfort operating in a small, fast-moving, low-process environment, including working without a dedicated PM and creating clarity from product and customer context
- 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, with the judgment to use them as force multipliers rather than substitutes for understanding
- Able to communicate tradeoffs clearly in writing and discussion and bring other engineers along through review and design work
- Remote-first team
Desired Qualifications
- Full-stack or product engineering exposure, especially experience shipping product-facing features from ambiguous requirements
Hiring someone like this?
Get your role in front of qualified candidates on Sorce.