Staff R&D Software Engineer, Fivetran AI
$183,711–$229,639 year
HybridAustin, Texas, United States
Job Summary
Research emerging AI retrieval and reasoning techniques, then decide which ideas warrant production software for the Fivetran AI roadmap. Prototype new concepts quickly, harden proven solutions into shipped features, and define technical direction across multiple teams to ensure architectural consistency. Build and maintain both back-end and front-end systems for Agents Schema pipelines and the Context Catalog UI, while driving the AISQL capability from natural language to warehouse-executed SQL. Take ownership of production reliability through on-call rotation, incident response, and SRE work, and set the bar for testing and QA practices. Mentor other engineers, participate in hiring, and leverage coding agents to automate repetitive tasks.
Required Qualifications
- 8+ 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 team
- able to exert influence and define technical direction across multiple teams
- Comfortable reading AI/ML research and turning promising findings into working prototypes, then production systems
- Strong product and market awareness — able to judge which emerging techniques are worth building versus which are hype
- Track record of taking ambiguous, high-level direction and independently defining and executing the concrete work to deliver it
- 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
- Demonstrated ability to mentor other engineers and influence technical decisions beyond the immediate team
- Thrives in a startup-like environment with shifting priorities and a high degree of ownership
- This is a full-time hybrid position based out of our Austin, TX office
- Our hybrid work model offers a blend of remote flexibility and in-person collaboration, including two days in the office each week to connect and build as a team
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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