Staff Data Engineer

Prefect

1d•$191,000 - $276,000•Remote

About The Position

Prefect builds and operates resilient, Pythonic orchestration and MCP platforms -- Prefect OSS, Prefect Cloud, FastMCP OSS, and Horizon -- used for mission-critical workloads. Our Vision: Prefect will define automation for the context era. Our Mission: Curate an intelligent context layer that delivers the right information at the right time. About Prefect: Prefect builds automation for an unpredictable world. The last decade of automation was about protecting workflows from unpredictability; in the agentic era, unpredictability is the point. Our mission is to give people confidence in automated work, whether that work is a mission-critical data pipeline or a fleet of AI agents. In August 2026, Prefect and Dagster, competitors for eight years, joined forces to build the next generation of automation infrastructure. Today, our ecosystem includes Dagster, the data platform; Prefect, the agent platform; and FastMCP, the leading open-source developer framework for the MCP ecosystem. Together, our open-source and commercial products are trusted by Fortune 500 companies, data innovators, and high-growth technology companies around the world. We think of our culture as the operating system of the company. We’ve carefully created a supportive, high-performance environment that empowers our team to do the best work of their careers, have meaningful impact, and continue growing personally and professionally. We’re a remote-first team that values high standards, ownership, and thoughtful collaboration.

Requirements

Staff-level data platform experience - you set architecture across orgs and work through stakeholders independently
Deep production experience with dbt and a modern cloud warehouse
Experience with a modern orchestrator and experience with Dagster is a plus
Hands-on with managed ingestion and reverse ETL tooling
Self-directed and able to turn ambiguous business asks into scoped, prioritized work
Comfortable working in the open on a public codebase

Responsibilities

Own the internal data platform end to end: Snowflake architecture, sizing, and cost; dbt transformations; orchestration standards in Dagster
Own ingestion tooling (Fivetran, Sling, dlt, AWS DMS) and reverse ETL (Hightouch, Census)
Own warehouse access controls and security — increasingly important as MCPs touch more of our data
Design the system so teams stop blocking each other: fewer cross-team dependencies, less homegrown ingestion debt, a sane change-data-capture story
Own platform reliability: Dagster+ alerting, data quality, and cost
Take on the deferred data backlog: one-off ingestion, enablement, and growth data work
Partner with engineering on SLA-carrying pipelines (billing, consumption pricing) where engineering retains ownership
Live in Dagster daily and feed what you learn back to the product team