Senior Research and Development Software Engineer, Fivetran

• 5+ years of programming experience across Python and/or Java, with the ability to move fluidly between back-end and front-end work
• Considered a trusted expert in your subject area, capable of executing complex, ambiguous tasks with minimal hand-holding
• Comfortable reading AI/ML research and turning promising findings into working prototypes
• Strong product and market awareness — able to judge which emerging techniques are worth building versus which are hype
• Experience with SQL and data warehouses (BigQuery, Snowflake, Databricks, or similar)
• Genuine willingness to work across the full stack: research, backend, frontend, SRE, and QA, as the team’s needs demand
• Writes well-structured, performant code and can dive into unfamiliar codebases to suggest improvements
• Experience using coding agents or similar AI tooling to speed up day-to-day engineering work
• Analytical mindset to identify gaps in existing systems and design practical, pragmatic improvements
• Thrives in a startup-like environment with shifting priorities and a high degree of ownership

Desirable

• Fivetran and dbt are building the open data infrastructure that powers AI agents you can trust
• Fivetran is looking for a Senior R&D Software Engineer to join our fast-growing Fivetran AI team
• Your data stack was built for humans — but agents are the new primary data consumers, and they have fundamentally different requirements
• Agents can’t intuit context; it must be explicitly codified, governed, and traceable
• We’re building the governed context layer that solves this problem: Agents Schema, an open standard for storing agent-ready context directly in the customer’s own data warehouse, and Context Builder, the managed service that keeps it filled and fresh
• This role goes well beyond standard engineering
• You’ll research emerging techniques in the fast-moving AI landscape and bring real product and market understanding to decide which ideas are worth pursuing — and then you’ll take what you’ve learned and ship it as production software
• We’re looking for a true generalist who is willing and able to wear whatever hat the moment calls for: prototyping a new retrieval technique one week, hardening a backend service the next, then doing SRE or QA work when the team needs it
• Fivetran AI operates like a startup within Fivetran, and we need engineers who thrive on that range rather than staying in one lane
• Builds Infrastructure Agents Can Trust — join our mission to deliver the governed context layer that AI agents depend on: accurate semantic definitions, traceable lineage, data contracts, and auditable history baked in from the start
• Embraces Open Standards — help build portable, interoperable data infrastructure: Agents Schema, open formats (Iceberg, Delta Lake), MCP-native interfaces, and connector skills that work with any model and any compute
• Scales Without Breaking — work to make Fivetran AI efficient at agent scale, where unit costs deflate as volume grows and context retrieval is fast, accurate, and cost-controlled
• We emphasize using no-nonsense tools and take great pride in the simplicity and effectiveness of the systems we build. Our back-end is built on Java, Python, Postgres, and Kubernetes, and our front-end is built on React and TypeScript
• Technologies You’ll Use:
• Python, Java, SQL, dbt, LLMs (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini), vector databases, BigQuery / Snowflake / Databricks, MCP protocol, React, TypeScript, Kubernetes
• Research emerging techniques in retrieval, reasoning, and agentic AI, and evaluate what’s actually relevant to Fivetran AI’s roadmap
• Prototype new ideas quickly, then take the ones that prove out and turn them into shipped, production-grade features
• Build and maintain both back-end and front-end systems for the Fivetran AI product — from Agents Schema pipelines to the Context Catalog UI
• Contribute to the AISQL capability: natural language to SQL grounded in dbt metric definitions, executed natively against the warehouse
• Take ownership of production reliability: on-call rotation, incident response, and SRE work to keep the platform trustworthy at scale
• Write and maintain tests, and do hands-on QA to catch issues before customers do
• Use coding agents to automate the repetitive parts of the job, freeing up time for the research and design work that needs a human
• Partner with product and design, bringing your own understanding of the AI tooling market to shape what gets built next
• Develop software designs and contribute to the technical roadmap for the Fivetran AI platform
• Contribute to hiring by participating in the interview process