Staff 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 Staff R&D Software Engineer to join the fast-growing Fivetran AI team. The role focuses on building the governed context layer for AI agents, including Agents Schema and Context Builder. This is a full-time hybrid position based in New York, NY, with two days in the office per week.

• Research emerging techniques in retrieval, reasoning, and agentic AI, and decide what's worth pursuing for Fivetran AI's roadmap.
• Prototype new ideas and turn them into production-grade features.
• Define technical direction across multiple teams within Fivetran AI.
• Build and maintain back-end and front-end systems, from Agents Schema pipelines to the Context Catalog UI.
• Drive the AISQL capability: natural language to SQL grounded in dbt metric definitions.
• Take ownership of production reliability: on-call, incident response, and SRE work.
• 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, with ability to move between back-end and front-end.
• Trusted expert beyond your own team, able to define technical direction.
• Comfortable reading AI/ML research and turning findings into prototypes and production systems.
• 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.
• Thrives in a startup-like environment.

• Experience with LLM-powered applications (RAG pipelines, embeddings, evaluation frameworks, agent 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: $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