We Built Prefect to Make Automation Visible and Dependable, So Data Teams Can Move Fast and Fix Issues When They Arise: Jeremiah Lowin, CEO of Prefect

Prefect is a workflow orchestration platform that helps data and engineering teams automate tasks reliably and clearly. Whether deployed on your own infrastructure or in the cloud, it combines Python with tools for retries, scheduling, caching, and failure notifications. Designed for today’s complex data environments, Prefect makes automation reliable and transparent, turning it into a dependable partner for data teams.

Jeremiah Lowin, CEO, co-founded Prefect in 2018 after hitting a ceiling with existing tools. He had been using data science libraries that launched thousands of dependent tasks in parallel, but traditional orchestrators like Airflow could only manage a few tasks per second, far too slow for modern data workloads. Frustrated, he built a tool for himself, nicknaming it Tin Man, with the goal of handling repetitive tasks more intelligently. What started as a solo project soon resonated with others facing the same frustrations, leading Jeremiah to imagine a broader solution.

Automation with Resilience in Mind

Early interest from peers validated the need for a more capable orchestrator. Jeremiah realized that as workflows become more automated, visibility into failure becomes critically important. He designed Prefect to detect issues quickly, surface errors fully, and empower teams to respond right away. Workflow failures don’t just interrupt tasks but threaten trust in automation altogether. Prefect focuses on giving users the tools to understand and react to failures before they escalate.

He asked himself how teams could move fast without compromising safety and visibility. Prefect was designed to answer that question by bringing failure awareness into the tooling itself.

Launching with Community at the Center

Jeremiah and his co-founder, Chris White, launched Prefect as an open-source project in 2019 with an emphasis on building a strong community. They hoped for maybe a hundred GitHub stars. Instead, Prefect gained over 500 stars within days, signaling how desperately the industry needed tools like this.

They treated early adopters as customers, visiting offices, offering tutorials, and providing rapid Slack support. By prioritizing real human connections, Prefect built credibility and trust from day one. That same spirit of active empathy drives the company culture today.

Pythonic Simplicity Meets Scalable Execution

Prefect stands out by keeping things simple for data practitioners while powering large-scale deployments. Workflows are defined using plain Python decorators—turning scripts into orchestrated processes in just a few lines of code. Teams can choose to run workflows locally or move them seamlessly to Prefect Cloud. Features like retries, conditional workflows, result caching, and event triggering help teams make pipelines resilient and efficient.

Prefect trims infrastructure costs by up to 70 percent while giving teams deep insight into how workflows execute in real time. The magic lies in offering both ease and power without compromise.

Purpose-Built for Modern Data Teams

Traditional ETL tools and orchestrators were not built for machine learning, analytics, and modern pipelines. Prefect emerged to bridge that gap, designed by a data practitioner, for data practitioners. That lineage shows in its UX, flexibility, and failure-first mindset. With Prefect, a data science team can build, test, and troubleshoot their pipelines with confidence and full control.

Jeremiah often says that data teams should treat automation failures as opportunities to improve rather than sources of anxiety. Prefect supports that philosophy with clarity, logging, and guided debugging.

Building Open Source with Intent

Inevitably, building open-source means stepping into the spotlight while giving up some control. Prefect moved forward by inviting early users into a community, creating user councils, and personally visiting teams. That sense of shared ownership lifted Prefect beyond code—it made it a collaborative project.

The open-source project is treated as a product in its own right. It receives investments, priorities, and care just like any commercial offering. That unusual focus turned community into a foundation for growth, not just an afterthought.

Growing Impact Across Industries

Prefect now serves teams at companies like Cash App, Rent the Runway, and Endpoint. In each case, workflows were hard to maintain, costly, or fragile. Prefect helped teams streamline deployments, reduce errors, and cut infrastructure costs significantly—sometimes by over 70 percent.

By offering both self-hosted and cloud options, Prefect adapts to various team sizes and regulatory environments. For any data team looking to move faster without losing control, Prefect offers a safe, scalable path forward.

Leadership That Blends Vision with Detail

Jeremiah’s path, from economics and statistics to risk management and automation, shaped how he builds products and teams. His academic grounding taught him to trace how variables interact, while his professional experience drove him to build systems that prevent cascading failures.

He remains grounded in operational realities. He regularly engages with customers, reviews error logs, and stays close to user feedback, believing human-centered design underpins technical reliability. For Jeremiah, leadership brings curiosity, follow-through, and trust-building.

What’s Next for Prefect

Prefect continues to push the boundary of workflow orchestration. Jeremiah is exploring transactional orchestration, solutions that give teams control, visibility, and resilience even when workflows cross complex systems. The goal is a future where workflows fail predictably, recover automatically, and remain trustworthy in real time.

As data becomes central to every company, Prefect aims to be the orchestration layer that empowers engineers to build without fear. With strong community roots, thoughtful design, and a culture of resilience, Prefect is poised to grow with the demands of tomorrow’s data-driven world.

Jeremiah Lowin, Founder & CEO, Prefect

Prefect makes automation effortless by giving teams the ability to monitor, manage, and resolve workflow issues in real time, keeping operations smooth and reliable.