Senior Staff R&D Software Engineer, Fivetran AI
$219,706–$274,632 year
HybridAustin, Texas, United States
Job Summary
Identify emerging AI research techniques, set the technical roadmap, and prototype ideas before shipping them as production features. Define cross-departmental technical direction for Agents Schema and Context Builder, resolving architectural tradeoffs across product, data platform, and go-to-market teams. Build and maintain full-stack systems using Python, Java, and React, while establishing engineering quality standards and hands-on QA practices. Manage on-call rotation and incident response to ensure platform reliability at scale, and mentor senior engineers to amplify technical judgment. Use coding agents to automate repetitive tasks, freeing capacity for deep research and design work.
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 — able to judge which emerging techniques are worth building versus which are hype
- Demonstrated ability to mentor senior and staff engineers and influence technical decisions across departments
- Thrives in a startup-like environment with shifting priorities and a high degree of ownership
- 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 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
- Define your own priorities and roadmap based on your judgment of what will most move Fivetran AI forward, with minimal oversight
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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