Senior Staff R&D Software Engineer, Fivetran AI
$232,338–$290,422 year
HybridOakland, California, United States
Job Summary
Identify emerging AI research and techniques to set the technical roadmap for Fivetran AI, then prototype ideas and ship them as production-grade features. Define cross-departmental technical direction spanning product, data platform, and go-to-market, resolving architectural tradeoffs while defining your own priorities with minimal oversight. Build and maintain both back-end and front-end systems for Agents Schema and the Context Catalog UI, including pipelines, the catalog UI, and AISQL capabilities. Take ownership of production reliability through on-call rotation, incident response, and SRE work to ensure system trust at scale. Mentor staff engineers and influence technical decisions across departments while representing the team's perspective in cross-departmental strategy. Use coding agents to automate repetitive tasks, freeing time for high-level design and research.
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
- This is a full-time position based out of our Oakland, CA office
- Our hybrid work model offers a blend of remote flexibility and in-person collaboration, including 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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