Senior R&D Software Engineer, Fivetran AI

Fivetran and dbt Labs are bringing together two industry-leading companies with a shared mission: helping organizations unlock the full value of their data. Together, we deliver the data infrastructure layer that helps organizations move, transform, and trust their data — from the moment data moves, through every transformation, to the context teams and AI systems rely on.

Fivetran is looking for a Senior R&D Software Engineer to join the fast-growing Fivetran AI team. We are building the governed context layer that powers AI agents you can trust: Agents Schema, an open standard for storing agent-ready context directly in the customer’s own data warehouse, and Context Builder, the managed service that keeps it filled and fresh. This role goes beyond standard engineering — you’ll research emerging AI techniques, prototype new ideas, and ship production software. You’ll work across the full stack: research, backend, frontend, SRE, and QA, as the team’s needs demand.

• Research emerging techniques in retrieval, reasoning, and agentic AI, and evaluate what’s relevant to Fivetran AI’s roadmap.
• Prototype new ideas quickly and turn proven ones into production-grade features.
• Build and maintain back-end and front-end systems for the Fivetran AI product — from Agents Schema pipelines to the Context Catalog UI.
• Contribute to the AISQL capability: natural language to SQL grounded in dbt metric definitions, executed natively against the warehouse.
• Take ownership of 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 parts of the job.
• Partner with product and design to shape what gets built next.
• Develop software designs and contribute to the technical roadmap.
• Contribute to hiring by participating in the interview process.

• 5+ 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 in your subject area, capable of executing complex, ambiguous tasks with minimal hand-holding.
• Comfortable reading AI/ML research and turning promising findings into working prototypes.
• Strong product and market awareness — able to judge which emerging techniques are worth building versus which are hype.
• 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.
• 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 a high degree of 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 PTO, paid sick time, inclusive parental leave, holidays (including a year-end Global Week of Rest), volunteer days off, RSU stock grants, professional development and training opportunities, company virtual happy hours, free food, team-building activities, monthly cell phone stipend, and access to an innovative mental health support platform.

Apply via the Fivetran careers page for this role.