Senior Staff R&D Software Engineer, Fivetran AI

What You’ll Do

• Identify which emerging AI research and techniques are worth pursuing, and set the agenda for Fivetran AI’s technical roadmap accordingly
• Prototype new ideas quickly, then take the ones that prove out and turn them into shipped, production-grade features
• Define technical direction that spans Fivetran AI and collaborating departments — product, data platform, and go-to-market — resolving architectural tradeoffs that cross department lines
• Build and maintain both back-end and front-end systems for the Fivetran AI product — from Agents Schema pipelines to the Context Catalog UI
• Set the long-term technical vision for capabilities like AISQL: 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 engineering quality, testing, and QA practices across the department, and do hands-on 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
• Define your own priorities and roadmap based on your judgment of what will most move Fivetran AI forward, with minimal oversight
• Mentor staff and senior engineers, and act as a multiplier for technical judgment across the department
• Represent Fivetran AI’s technical perspective in cross-department planning and strategy discussions
• Contribute to hiring by participating in and helping shape the interview process

Skills We’re Looking For

• 10+ 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 department, able to exert influence and shape direction with collaborating departments
• Comfortable reading AI/ML research and turning promising findings into working prototypes, then production systems, at a level that sets direction for others
• Deep product and market awareness — able to judge which emerging techniques are worth building versus which are hype, and defend that judgment to skeptical stakeholders
• Track record of defining your own direction and executing it with the highest level of independence, with little need for oversight
• 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 senior and staff engineers and influence technical decisions across departments
• 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