Senior Sales Engineer (East/Central)

Location: Remote Workplace: Remote 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. ROLE SUMMARY: Prefect acquired Dagster this summer. Our sales engineers now sell three things. Prefect Cloud. Dagster+. And the next generation of AI tooling we're building across both: governed access to tools and data for agents, and durable workflows where agents and humans do the work together. We're also selling something that isn't on a pricing page. FastMCP, our open-source MCP framework, sits inside a lot of production agent stacks, so teams come to us for how the whole thing should fit: the data layer, the orchestration layer, the context layer, and how agents and humans operate across all three. Much of what a sales engineer does here is demonstrate the art of the possible. You're a Senior Sales Engineer on the Prefect subject-matter-expert pod, reporting to Wayne Grigsby, Sales Engineering Lead. The pod sits alongside our Dagster pod, and both roll up to Director of Sales Engineering, who runs the function end to end, pre-sale and post-sale. This is a pre-sales seat. You pair with account executives on new business from the first technical call to signature: discovery, tailored demos, proofs of concepts, security and architecture reviews, and the slow procurement stretch at the end. You'll work across the whole platform. Your job is to figure out how the pieces fit for a given customer, then prove it. Location & Time Zone: This is a remote, U.S.-based role. We're prioritizing candidates in the Eastern and Central time zones to ensure strong coverage for customers across the U.S. East Coast and Europe. Candidates in other locations who can consistently support these working hours are also encouraged to apply. WHAT YOU'LL DO: - Own the technical side of enterprise deals. From discovery through close: advising prospects, presenting and demonstrating the value of our platforms from a technical perspective. - Distill the use case. Most prospects don't arrive with a clean requirement. They arrive with a data platform, a pile of tools, a team of engineers and users expecting answers, and a budget. You figure out how our products fit together to solve for their use case, then help them validate the approach. - Sell across the platform. A single conversation can span Prefect, Dagster, FastMCP, hybrid architecture, and AI governance, often with a team that knows where it wants to end up but not how to get there. - Turn field signal into product direction. Sales engineers are the closest thing to a market pulse this company has. You'll carry what you hear into our GTM-engineering partnership channels, with evidence, and push when it matters. - Build the things we sell with. Demo environments, architecture diagrams, competitive battlecards, contributions to our internal repos, personal projects, and the occasional blog post. - Contribute and advocate for your ideas. Champion the culture, and keep projects from quietly failing. When something is going sideways, you say so early and you help fix it. YOUR QUALIFICATIONS: Five things. If you have these, apply, even if the nice-to-haves are thin. 1. 3+ years of engineering experience, building real solutions. Data engineering, DevOps, software engineering, data science: the discipline matters less than the fact that you've built something programmatically and shipped it. Python is our house language. 2. 2+ years in a customer facing role. Deep discovery skills and the habit of uncovering the real problem before proposing anything is key. You ask the second and third question, and you notice what the customer isn't saying. 3. Curiosity first, then creativity. You take things apart to see how they work, and you don't stop at the docs. Then you put the pieces together in ways nobody handed you: a new use case, a demo that didn't exist yesterday, a workaround the customer didn't know was possible. 4. You explain hard things clearly to engineers. What's required is that a senior platform engineer finishes a call with you and trusts you. Nice to have: - 2+ years of prior sales engineering experience. - 2+ years of Enterprise infrastructure depth. In at least one major cloud (Azure, AWS, or GCP), and comfort with Kubernetes, networking, IAM, service mesh, and a production database like Postgres. - Orchestration tooling as a user, builder, or seller: Prefect, Dagster, Airflow, Temporal, Step Functions, etc. - Fascinated by AI and tinkering with MCP, agents, or LLM applications. WHAT YOU'LL GET IN RETURN: OTE Ranges : - San Francisco Bay Area & NYC Metro: $252,000–$301,000 (OTE) - Washington D.C., Boston, LA Metro, Seattle: $241,000–$280,000 (OTE) - Denver, Chicago, Atlanta, & all other U.S. metros: $233,000–$279,000 (OTE) Actual base salary within each range depends on the candidate's location, experience, and qualifications. Equity and benefits are not included in the range above. Your recruiter can share more about the salary range for your preferred location during the hiring process. Perks and Benefits: - 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/month remote work stipend And that's just the start — for more info check out our 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. Delaney is a real live person (👋🏻) and is looking forward to learning more about you through your application.