Senior Staff R&D Software Engineer, Fivetran AI

Fivetran helps organizations automate data movement across the systems, clouds, engines, and tools they rely on. Together with dbt Labs, they are building the data infrastructure layer that helps organizations move, transform, and trust their data.

Fivetran is looking for a Senior Staff R&D Software Engineer to join the Fivetran AI team. The team is building the governed context layer for AI agents, including Agents Schema and Context Builder. This role involves researching emerging AI techniques, prototyping, and shipping production software, with a focus on open standards and scalable infrastructure.

• Identify which emerging AI research and techniques are worth pursuing and set the technical roadmap.
• Prototype new ideas and turn them into production-grade features.
• Define technical direction across Fivetran AI and collaborating departments.
• Build and maintain back-end and front-end systems, from Agents Schema pipelines to the Context Catalog UI.
• Set long-term technical vision for capabilities like AISQL.
• Own production reliability, including on-call and incident response.
• Set engineering quality standards and mentor staff and senior engineers.
• Use coding agents to automate repetitive tasks.

• 10+ years of programming experience in Python and/or Java.
• Trusted expert beyond own department, able to influence direction.
• Comfortable reading AI/ML research and turning findings into prototypes and production systems.
• Deep 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.
• Experience using coding agents or similar AI tooling.
• Demonstrated ability to mentor senior and staff engineers.

• Experience with LLM-powered applications (RAG, embeddings, evaluation frameworks).
• Familiarity with semantic layers (dbt, LookML, Sigma).
• Experience with MCP ecosystem or AI agent integrations.
• Background in site reliability engineering.
• Experience in data processing (ETL, ELT) and building data connectors.
• Experience with AWS, GCP, Kubernetes, or Docker.
• Contributions to open source AI or data projects.

New York Pay Range: $232,338—$290,422 USD.

• 100% employer-paid medical insurance
• Generous PTO, paid sick time, parental leave, holidays, and volunteer days off
• RSU stock grants
• Professional development and training opportunities
• Monthly cell phone stipend
• Mental health support platform

Apply via the Fivetran careers page.