Staff R&D Software Engineer, Fivetran AI

What You’ll Do

• Research emerging techniques in retrieval, reasoning, and agentic AI, and decide what’s actually worth pursuing for Fivetran AI’s roadmap — then convince others
• Prototype new ideas quickly, then take the ones that prove out and turn them into shipped, production-grade features
• Define technical direction that spans multiple teams within Fivetran AI, ensuring architecture decisions made in one area don’t create problems in another
• Build and maintain both back-end and front-end systems for the Fivetran AI product — from Agents Schema pipelines to the Context Catalog UI
• Drive the AISQL capability forward: natural language to SQL grounded in dbt metric definitions, executed natively against the warehouse
• Take ownership of production reliability across the platform: on-call rotation, incident response, and SRE work to keep the system trustworthy at scale
• Set the bar for testing and QA practices, and do hands-on QA work yourself when it matters most
• Use coding agents to automate the repetitive parts of the job, freeing up time for the research and design work that needs a human
• Take high-level direction from product and leadership and independently define and execute the concrete plan to get there
• Mentor other engineers and raise the technical bar across the Fivetran AI team
• Contribute to hiring by participating in and helping shape the interview process

Skills We’re Looking For

• 8+ years of programming experience across Python and/or Java, with the ability to move fluidly between back-end and front-end work
• Considered a trusted expert beyond your own team, able to exert influence and define technical direction across multiple teams
• Comfortable reading AI/ML research and turning promising findings into working prototypes, then production systems
• Strong product and market awareness — able to judge which emerging techniques are worth building versus which are hype
• Track record of taking ambiguous, high-level direction and independently defining and executing the concrete work to deliver it
• Experience with SQL and data warehouses (BigQuery, Snowflake, Databricks, or similar)
• Genuine willingness to work across the full stack: research, backend, frontend, SRE, and QA, as the team’s needs demand
• Writes well-structured, performant code and can dive into unfamiliar codebases to suggest improvements
• Experience using coding agents or similar AI tooling to speed up day-to-day engineering work
• Demonstrated ability to mentor other engineers and influence technical decisions beyond your immediate team
• Thrives in a startup-like environment with shifting priorities and a high degree of ownership

Bonus Skills

• Experience with LLM-powered applications — RAG pipelines, embeddings, evaluation frameworks, or agent frameworks
• Familiarity with semantic layers — dbt, LookML, Sigma, or similar
• Experience with the MCP (Model Context Protocol) ecosystem or building AI agent integrations
• Background in site reliability engineering — monitoring, alerting, incident response
• Experience in data processing (ETL, ELT) and/or building data connectors
• Experienced working in a cloud environment utilizing AWS, GCP, Kubernetes, or Docker
• Contributions to open source AI or data projects

Technologies You’ll Use

• Python, Java, SQL, dbt, LLMs (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini), vector databases, BigQuery / Snowflake / Databricks, MCP protocol, React, TypeScript, Kubernetes