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 Fivetran AI team. The team builds the governed context layer: 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: research emerging AI techniques, prototype new ideas, and ship production software. You'll work across the full stack—backend, frontend, SRE, and QA—as needed.

• Research emerging techniques in retrieval, reasoning, and agentic AI, and decide what's worth pursuing for the roadmap.
• Prototype new ideas quickly and turn proven ones into production-grade features.
• Define technical direction spanning 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 rotation, incident response, and SRE work.
• Set the bar for testing and QA practices, and do hands-on QA work.
• Use coding agents to automate repetitive parts of the job.
• Take high-level direction and independently define and execute concrete plans.
• 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 work.
• Trusted expert beyond your own team, able to influence 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.
• Writes well-structured, performant code.
• 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, or agent frameworks.
• Familiarity with semantic layers—dbt, LookML, Sigma, or similar.
• Experience with the MCP ecosystem or building AI agent integrations.
• Background in site reliability engineering.
• Experience in data processing (ETL, ELT) and/or building data connectors.
• Experience with AWS, GCP, Kubernetes, or Docker.
• Contributions to open source AI or data projects.

Pay Range: $183,711—$229,638.75 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, 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. Benefits may vary by country and worker type.

Apply through the Fivetran careers page for this job ID.