Staff R&D Software Engineer, Fivetran AI

Fivetran and dbt Labs are joining forces to build the data infrastructure layer that helps organizations move, transform, and trust their data. Fivetran automates data movement across systems, clouds, and engines, while dbt Labs pioneered analytics engineering. Together, they support thousands of organizations in building a trusted foundation for analytics, AI, and business decisions.

Fivetran is seeking a Staff R&D Software Engineer to join the Fivetran AI team. This role focuses on building the governed context layer for AI agents, including Agents Schema (an open standard for storing agent-ready context in the customer's data warehouse) and Context Builder (a managed service that keeps it fresh). The role involves researching emerging AI techniques, prototyping, and shipping production software across the full stack.

• Research emerging techniques in retrieval, reasoning, and agentic AI, and decide what's worth pursuing for the 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 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 tasks.
• Take high-level direction and independently 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.
• Trusted expert able to define technical direction across multiple teams.
• 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, agent frameworks).
• Familiarity with semantic layers (dbt, LookML, Sigma).
• Experience with MCP (Model Context Protocol) ecosystem.
• 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.

Denver 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.

Apply via the Fivetran careers page for this job ID.