Staff R&D Software Engineer, Fivetran AI

Fivetran and dbt Labs are bringing together two industry-leading companies to deliver the data infrastructure layer that helps organizations move, transform, and trust their data. Fivetran AI is building the governed context layer for AI agents, including Agents Schema and Context Builder.

We are looking for a Staff R&D Software Engineer to join the Fivetran AI team. This role involves researching emerging AI techniques, prototyping, and shipping production software. You will define technical direction across teams, build back-end and front-end systems, drive AISQL capability, and take ownership of production reliability.

• Research emerging techniques in retrieval, reasoning, and agentic AI
• Prototype new ideas and turn them into production-grade features
• Define technical direction spanning multiple teams
• Build and maintain back-end and front-end systems for Fivetran AI
• Drive AISQL capability: natural language to SQL grounded in dbt metric definitions
• Take ownership of production reliability, including on-call and incident response
• Set the bar for testing and QA practices
• Use coding agents to automate repetitive tasks
• Mentor other engineers and contribute to hiring

• 8+ years of programming experience across Python and/or Java
• Trusted expert able to influence technical direction across teams
• Comfortable reading AI/ML research and turning findings into 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
• Experience using coding agents or similar AI tooling
• Demonstrated ability to mentor other engineers

• Experience with LLM-powered applications (RAG pipelines, 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 data connectors
• Experience with AWS, GCP, Kubernetes, or Docker
• Contributions to open source AI or data projects

Oakland Pay Range: $196,033—$245,041.50 USD

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

Apply via the Fivetran careers page.