# Senior Staff R&D Software Engineer, Fivetran AI

**Company:** [Fivetran](https://hotfix.jobs/companies/fivetran)
**Location:** Unspecified
**Role:** ML Engineering
**Salary:** $232k – $290k/yr
**Experience:** 10+ years
**Skills:** Python, Java, SQL, dbt, LLMs, Vector Databases, BigQuery, Snowflake, Databricks, mcp protocol, React, TypeScript, Kubernetes
**Posted:** 2026-07-20

> Senior Staff R&D Software Engineer building the governed context layer (Agents Schema and Context Builder) for trustworthy AI agents. Research emerging AI techniques, prototype and ship production backend/frontend systems, define technical roadmap, own reliability/SRE, and mentor across teams. Requires 10+ years experience, full-stack flexibility, and deep AI/product judgment.

## Job Description

## 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

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