About the Role
Fivetran and dbt are building the open data infrastructure that powers AI agents you can trust.
Fivetran is looking for a Senior R&D Software Engineer to join our fast-growing Fivetran AI team. Your data stack was built for humans — but agents are the new primary data consumers, and they have fundamentally different requirements. Agents can’t intuit context; it must be explicitly codified, governed, and traceable. We’re building the governed context layer that solves this problem: Agents Schema, an open standard for storing agent-ready context directly in the customer’s own data warehouse, and Context Builder, the managed service that keeps it filled and fresh.
This role goes well beyond standard engineering. You’ll research emerging techniques in the fast-moving AI landscape and bring real product and market understanding to decide which ideas are worth pursuing — and then you’ll take what you’ve learned and ship it as production software. We’re looking for a true generalist who is willing and able to wear whatever hat the moment calls for: prototyping a new retrieval technique one week, hardening a backend service the next, then doing SRE or QA work when the team needs it. Fivetran AI operates like a startup within Fivetran, and we need engineers who thrive on that range rather than staying in one lane.
Responsibilities
- Research emerging techniques in retrieval, reasoning, and agentic AI, and evaluate what’s actually relevant to Fivetran AI’s roadmap
- Prototype new ideas quickly, then take the ones that prove out and turn them into shipped, production-grade features
- Build and maintain both back-end and front-end systems for the Fivetran AI product — from Agents Schema pipelines to the Context Catalog UI
- Contribute to the AISQL capability: natural language to SQL grounded in dbt metric definitions, executed natively against the warehouse
- Take ownership of production reliability: on-call rotation, incident response, and SRE work to keep the platform trustworthy at scale
- Write and maintain tests, and do hands-on QA to catch issues before customers do
- Use coding agents to automate the repetitive parts of the job, freeing up time for the research and design work that needs a human
- Partner with product and design, bringing your own understanding of the AI tooling market to shape what gets built next
- Develop software designs and contribute to the technical roadmap for the Fivetran AI platform
- Contribute to hiring by participating in the interview process
Requirements
- 5+ years of programming experience across Python and/or Java, with the ability to move fluidly between back-end and front-end work
- Considered a trusted expert in your subject area, capable of executing complex, ambiguous tasks
- Experience with SQL, dbt, LLMs (Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini), vector databases, BigQuery / Snowflake / Databricks, MCP protocol, React, TypeScript, Kubernetes
Conditions
- Full-time hybrid position based out of our Oakland, CA office
- Hybrid work model offers a blend of remote flexibility and in-person collaboration, including two days in the office each week