Senior R&D Software Engineer, Fivetran AI

Fivetran and dbt are building the open data infrastructure that powers AI agents you can trust. Fivetran is looking for a Senior R&D Software Engineer to join the Fivetran AI team. This role goes beyond standard engineering: research emerging AI techniques, prototype new ideas, and ship production software. The team operates like a startup within Fivetran, requiring a generalist comfortable with backend, frontend, SRE, and QA work.

• Research emerging techniques in retrieval, reasoning, and agentic AI, and evaluate relevance to the roadmap.
• Prototype new ideas and turn proven ones into production-grade features.
• Build and maintain back-end and front-end systems for the Fivetran AI product, including Agents Schema pipelines and the Context Catalog UI.
• Contribute to the AISQL capability: natural language to SQL grounded in dbt metric definitions.
• Own production reliability: on-call rotation, incident response, and SRE work.
• Write and maintain tests, and do hands-on QA.
• Use coding agents to automate repetitive tasks.
• Partner with product and design to shape what gets built.
• Develop software designs and contribute to the technical roadmap.
• Participate in the interview process.

• 5+ years of programming experience across Python and/or Java, with ability to move between back-end and front-end work.
• Trusted expert in your subject area, capable of executing complex, ambiguous tasks with minimal hand-holding.
• Comfortable reading AI/ML research and turning findings into working prototypes.
• Strong product and market awareness.
• Experience with SQL and data warehouses (BigQuery, Snowflake, Databricks, or similar).
• Willingness to work across the full stack: research, backend, frontend, SRE, and QA.
• Writes well-structured, performant code and can dive into unfamiliar codebases.
• Experience using coding agents or similar AI tooling.
• Analytical mindset to identify gaps and design practical improvements.
• Thrives in a startup-like environment with shifting priorities and high ownership.

• 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.

Oakland Pay Range: $174,915—$209,906.50 USD. Benefits include 100% employer-paid medical insurance, generous paid time off, RSU stock grants, professional development opportunities, monthly cell phone stipend, and mental health support. May vary by country and worker type.