Senior Staff R&D Software Engineer, Fivetran AI
$219,706–$274,632 year
HybridDenver, Colorado, United States
Job Summary
Identify emerging AI research and techniques to set the technical roadmap for Fivetran AI, then prototype ideas before shipping them as production-grade features. Define cross-departmental technical direction across product, data platform, and go-to-market teams, resolving architectural tradeoffs while maintaining independence in your own priorities. Build and maintain full-stack systems for Agents Schema pipelines and the Context Catalog UI, using Python, Java, SQL, and React to deliver governed context layers for AI agents. Manage on-call rotation, incident response, and SRE work to ensure platform reliability at scale, while mentoring senior engineers and shaping hiring practices.
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 Denver, CO office
- hybrid work model offers a blend of remote flexibility and in-person collaboration
- 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
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