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. Fivetran automates data movement across systems, clouds, engines, and tools, while dbt Labs pioneered analytics engineering. Together, they support thousands of organizations building a trusted foundation for analytics, AI, and better business decisions.

Fivetran is looking for a Senior R&D Software Engineer to join the fast-growing Fivetran AI team. The team is building the governed context layer for AI agents: Agents Schema, an open standard for storing agent-ready context in the customer's 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, evaluate product and market fit, and ship production software. You'll work across the full stack—prototyping retrieval techniques, hardening backend services, and doing SRE or QA work as needed. Fivetran AI operates like a startup within Fivetran.

• Research emerging techniques in retrieval, reasoning, and agentic AI, and evaluate relevance 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 tasks.
• 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.
• 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 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.
• Experience in a cloud environment utilizing AWS, GCP, Kubernetes, or Docker.
• Contributions to open source AI or data projects.

New York Pay Range: $174,915—$209,906.50 USD. Benefits include 100% employer-paid medical insurance, generous paid time off including paid vacation or flexible/unlimited vacation, paid sick time, inclusive parental leave, paid 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 a mental health support platform.

Apply via the Fivetran careers page for this job.