Staff Product Engineer

Prefect builds and operates resilient, Pythonic workflow platforms--
Prefect and FastMCP--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.

Our remote first company is singularly focused on this vision and mission, and every team member directly contributes to their advancement.

We've carefully created a supportive, high-performance culture - the operating system of our company - that empowers our team to do the best work of their careers and achieve their personal and professional aspirations.

Our company operates both open-source and commercial offerings, partnering with Fortune 500 companies, data innovators, and fast-growing digitally native startups. We are looking for folks who want to join a remote-first team #LI-Remote to continue building an equally amazing company, product, and developer community.

Role Summary:

Join a small, senior engineering group to ship end‑to‑end product slices that make Horizon indispensable for real users - owning everything from a quick wireframe and demo to the production service to the observability and page that wakes you up at 2 a.m. You'll partner directly with our CEO, VP of Product, other product engineers, and early customers, turn field signal into working software fast, and help us confidently identify where we can take the market then deliver.

Horizon helps developers deploy, scale, and manage MCP servers with zero configuration—built for modern AI development workflows with production-ready infrastructure. This role sits at the intersection of an emergent market where AI and LLM tooling are reshaping how development teams operate. We're looking for someone who shares our excitement about this space and brings strong opinions about where it's heading.

The right person is an enthusiastic, full-stack engineer who thrives in high‑ambiguity, seed-stage-alike startup environments and has repeatedly shipped meaningful products at early‑stage companies. You'll own the full product slice, not hand off pieces.

You'll report to Prefect's Director of Engineering, Jenny.

What You'll Do:

• Own end-to-end product slices of Horizon—from customer problem to wireframe to production service, including the user-facing UI/UX. You define what "done" means and you're accountable for it.

• Partner directly with the CEO, VP of Product, and early customers to turn field signal into working software at pace.

• Shape technical direction and architectural decisions for Horizon. Mentor product engineers on your team on systems thinking, reliability patterns, and shipping discipline.

• Develop deep product knowledge of the AI/LLM tooling space, MCP ecosystem, and how Horizon fits into emerging patterns. Stay sharp on market trends and help us position ourselves accordingly.

• Establish and refine our approach to operational excellence: sustainable on-call practices, incident response patterns, observability standards that scale.

• Participate in on-call/incident response and set the standard for how we handle production issues.

Your Qualifications:

• 8+ years of full-stack engineering experience, with demonstrated success shipping early-stage products from 0 to 1.0 and scaling them beyond.

• Deep proficiency in TypeScript across the full stack. Comfortable owning UI/UX implementation—not just backend services. Python experience is a bonus.

• Track record of owning user-facing features end-to-end—from the interface users interact with to the infrastructure that powers it—rather than primarily platform or backend systems work.

• 5+ years working with Postgres, Redis, and at least one major cloud platform (AWS strongly preferred). You understand distributed systems tradeoffs.

• Strong design and architectural thinking—you have opinions about how systems should be built, including user-facing interfaces, and can articulate the tradeoffs in your choices. Has taste for UI/UX.

• Proven experience with production observability (Datadog, Grafana, or equivalent). You've debugged complex issues in production systems.

• Experience building with the Model Context Protocol (MCP). You understand the ecosystem and have shipped with it.

• Genuine interest in AI, LLM tooling, and where this space is heading. You follow the landscape closely, have formed opinions, and are excited about building in this domain.

• Track record of mentoring engineers and raising technical standards on teams you've joined.

• Self-directed with strong judgment: you identify problems before they're obvious, propose solutions confidently, ship with incomplete information, and keep the team aligned through clear communication.

• Comfortable with AI-powered development tools (Cursor, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, etc.) as force multipliers for your work.

What You'll Get in Return:

Base Salary Ranges:

• San Francisco Bay Area & NYC Metro: $245,000-$280,000

• Washington D.C, Boston, Los Angeles, Seattle: $235,000-$265,000

• Denver, Chicago, Atlanta, & all other U.S. metros: $225,000-$255,000

Actual base salary within each range depends on the candidate's location, experience, and qualifications. Please keep in mind that equity and benefits are not included in the range provided above.

Your recruiter can share more about the salary range for your preferred location during the hiring process.

Perks and Benefits:

We take care of our team—our benefits are top-notch so that employees can work comfortably from wherever in the world they call home. Check out some of our most exciting benefits offered below.

• Remote-first team with flexible-first culture

• Equity Stock Options

• 401(k) with 5% company match (vests immediately!)

• Unlimited PTO

• Medical, Dental and Vision insurance

• Generous Parental Leave

• Life Insurance and Disability benefits

• $800 remote work stipend for whatever you need to work (food, wellness, equipment etc.)

And that is just the start, there's more! For more info check out our top-of-the-line benefits and perks on our careers page.

Belongingness at Prefect:

Belongingness at Prefect is our commitment to ensuring mutual power, access, and opportunity among all groups and individuals who make up our community. We operationalize belongingness through actions large and small on a daily basis, but always with the goal that all groups and individuals can contribute as their most authentic self to the evolution of our product, our team, and our community.

Belongingness is also our commitment to bridge with individuals or groups not yet established in our community, acknowledge differences in a way that affirms distinct identities, and allows for a new, more expansive group identity to form.

Equal Opportunity at Prefect:

Prefect is an equal opportunity employer and encourages applications from people of all backgrounds. All applicants will be considered for employment without attention to race, religion, color, sex (including pregnancy, sexual orientation and gender identity/expression), national origin, disability or any other status protected under applicable federal, state, or local laws.

Brad is a real live person (👋🏻) and is looking forward to learning more about you through your application.