Senior AI R&D Engineer - Data Infrastructure

Fivetran; Oakland (CA); Hybrid; USD 174,915 - 209,906; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical insurance (100% paid)

RSU stock grants

Generous PTO and holidays

Parental leave

Job summary

Fivetran in Oakland is seeking a Senior R&D Software Engineer to join our AI team. You’ll work across retrieval, reasoning, and agentic AI to ship production-grade features, prototyping fast and delivering reliable software in a startup-like environment.

You’ll own backend and frontend systems, contribute to AISQL, and help ensure scale and reliability while collaborating with product and design to guide the AI roadmap.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of programming experience with Python and/or Java.
• Experience with SQL and data warehouses (BigQuery, Snowflake, Databricks).
• Willingness to work across full stack: backend, frontend, SRE, and QA.
• Ability to read AI/ML research and translate findings into prototypes.
• Strong product and market awareness to decide which techniques are worth building.

Responsibilities

• Research emerging retrieval techniques and evaluate relevance to Fivetran AI’s roadmap.
• Prototype ideas quickly and ship production-grade features.
• Build and maintain backend and frontend systems for the Fivetran AI product.
• Contribute to AISQL capability: natural language to SQL grounded in dbt metric definitions.
• Own production reliability: on-call rotation, incident response, and SRE tasks.
• Write tests and perform hands-on QA to catch issues before customers.
• Collaborate with product and design to shape what gets built next.
• Develop software designs and contribute to the technical roadmap for the Fivetran AI platform.
• Participate in interviewing and hiring processes.

Skills

Python

Java

SQL

BigQuery

Snowflake

Databricks

dbt

Kubernetes

React

AI tooling

Tools

Docker

LookML

MCP protocol

Job description

Fivetran in Oakland is seeking a Senior R&D Software Engineer to join our AI team. You’ll work across retrieval, reasoning, and agentic AI to ship production-grade features, prototyping fast and delivering reliable software in a startup-like environment.

You’ll own backend and frontend systems, contribute to AISQL, and help ensure scale and reliability while collaborating with product and design to guide the AI roadmap.