Senior AI Infrastructure Engineer

United States Digital Space LLC; Oakland (CA); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 250,000; Full time

Job summary

dbt Labs in Oakland, CA is seeking a Senior R&D Software Engineer to join our fast‑growing AI team. You’ll research and ship production‑grade features for an open data infrastructure that powers AI agents, with a focus on governed context, retrieval techniques, and scalable backend services.

You’ll wear multiple hats, prototyping new ideas one week and hardening services the next, including on-call and SRE responsibilities to ensure reliability of the platform.

Qualifications

• Senior R&D Software Engineer role focusing on AI pipelines and production features.
• Experience researching AI retrieval/Reasoning techniques.
• Ability to wear multiple hats including SRE and QA.

Responsibilities

• Research emerging techniques in retrieval, reasoning, and agentic AI, and evaluate what’s actually relevant to the company AI’s roadmap.
• Prototype new ideas quickly, then turn the proven ones into shipped, production-grade features.
• Build and maintain back-end and front-end systems for the AI product—from Agents Schema pipelines to the Context Catalog UI.
• Contribute to AISQL capability: natural language to SQL grounded in dbt metric definitions, executed against the warehouse.
• Take ownership of production reliability: on-call rotation, incident response, and SRE work to keep the platform trustworthy.

Skills

Prototyping

Cross-functional collaboration

On-call / SRE familiarity

Tools

Python

Java

SQL

dbt

React

TypeScript

Kubernetes

Postgres

Job description

dbt Labs in Oakland, CA is seeking a Senior R&D Software Engineer to join our fast‑growing AI team. You’ll research and ship production‑grade features for an open data infrastructure that powers AI agents, with a focus on governed context, retrieval techniques, and scalable backend services.

You’ll wear multiple hats, prototyping new ideas one week and hardening services the next, including on-call and SRE responsibilities to ensure reliability of the platform.