Staff / Principal

Fivetran and dbt Labs are building data pipelines to power the modern data stack for thousands of companies. We're looking for a staff software engineer to be a technical leader on our Metadata team, which owns the metadata layer of the dbt platform — the discovery API, catalog, lineage, and run history services that let customers understand, trust, and act on what their data is doing.

• Lead the design and delivery of complex, team-level projects across the Metadata services, coordinating development across multiple engineers.
• Independently design and develop the architecture of new subsystems, and own team-level subsystems end to end.
• Use AI tooling and agents — across development and SDLC artifacts such as TDDs, PRDs, post-mortems, and test plans.
• Review and approve technical designs, ensuring they meet a high quality bar, and identify design deficiencies before they ship.
• Drive technical initiatives across the team's responsibility areas — discovery API, catalog, lineage, and run history.
• Set and uphold design, architecture, and coding best practices, and hold teammates accountable for code quality.
• Coach and mentor engineers, demonstrably improving the quality of code across the team.
• Write technical specs, document common components, and keep the team accountable for necessary project documentation.
• Fix and optimize critical parts of the codebase, drive incident follow-through, and advance the reliability and performance of the services you own.
• Participate periodically in the on-call rotation.

• 8+ years of software engineering experience with a track record of leading complex, team-scope technical work to completion.
• Deep expertise designing and owning subsystems in distributed, cloud-based systems.
• Demonstrated ability to set technical direction for a team and drive multi-engineer initiatives across an area of ownership.
• Excellent design and architecture judgment; identifies design flaws in existing systems and proposes sound solutions with clear trade-offs.
• Writes exemplary, well-tested code that serves as a model for others, and reliably estimates and delivers sprint to sprint.
• Strong track record of raising quality through code review, coaching peers, and enforcing accepted engineering practices.
• Experience partnering with QE on test strategy and owning operational health — incidents, post-mortems, reliability, and performance.
• Proficiency in a modern backend or systems language such as Python, Java, C++, or C#.
• Hands-on experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure), containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), and managing dev infrastructure.
• Fluent in using AI code assistants and coding agents to generate and investigate code, and conversational AI (e.g. Claude, ChatGPT) to author, review, and synthesize SDLC artifacts — and able to model those practices for a team.

• Experience in data processing (ETL, ELT) and/or cloud-based data platforms.
• Experience architecting metadata, catalog, lineage, or discovery/search systems.
• Experience with GraphQL APIs and high-throughput, multi-tenant data services.
• Familiarity with the analytics engineering workflow and the dbt ecosystem.

Denver Pay Range: $183,711—$229,638.75 USD. Perks include 100% employer-paid medical insurance, generous PTO plus paid sick time, inclusive parental leave, holidays (including 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 an innovative mental health support platform.

Apply through the Fivetran careers page for this role.