Senior Staff R&D Software Engineer, Fivetran AI
$232,338–$290,422 year
HybridNew York, United States
Job Summary
Identify emerging AI research techniques and set the technical roadmap for Fivetran AI's governed context layer. Prototype new ideas, then ship them as production-grade features across back-end, front-end, and SRE domains. Define cross-departmental technical direction for Agents Schema and Context Builder, resolving architectural tradeoffs while mentoring staff engineers. Take ownership of incident response and long-term vision for capabilities like AISQL, using coding agents to automate repetitive tasks. Define your own priorities with minimal oversight, balancing product judgment with hands-on execution to build portable, interoperable data infrastructure for AI agents.
Required Qualifications
- 10+ years of programming experience across Python and/or Java
- ability to move fluidly between back-end and front-end work
- Considered a trusted expert beyond your own department
- ability to exert influence and shape direction with collaborating departments
- Comfortable reading AI/ML research and turning promising findings into working prototypes, then production systems
- Deep product and market awareness
- ability to judge which emerging techniques are worth building versus which are hype
- Demonstrated ability to defend that judgment to skeptical stakeholders
- Track record of defining your own direction and executing it with the highest level of independence
- little need for oversight
- 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
- Writes well-structured, performant code
- ability to dive into unfamiliar codebases to suggest improvements
- Experience using coding agents or similar AI tooling to speed up day-to-day engineering work
- Demonstrated ability to mentor senior and staff engineers
- ability to influence technical decisions across departments
- Thrives in a startup-like environment with shifting priorities
- high degree of ownership
- full-time hybrid position based out of our New York, NY office
- two days in the office each week
Desired Qualifications
- 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 (Model Context Protocol) ecosystem or building AI agent integrations
- Background in site reliability engineering — monitoring, alerting, incident response
- Experience in data processing (ETL, ELT) and/or building data connectors
- Experienced working in a cloud environment utilizing AWS, GCP, Kubernetes, or Docker
- Contributions to open source AI or data projects
Hiring someone like this?
Get your role in front of qualified candidates on Sorce.