Staff AI R&D Engineer — Prototyping to Production

Fivetran, Inc.; Austin (TX); Hybrid; USD 183,711 - 229,638; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical insurance

Paid time off

Professional development

Team events

Cell phone stipend

Mental health resources

Job summary

Fivetran, Inc. is hiring a Staff R&D Software Engineer to join our AI team in Austin. You will research and prototype retrieval and agentic AI techniques, then ship production-grade features while driving cross-team technical direction. This role blends research, backend, frontend, SRE, and QA work with high ownership.

You’ll work with a stack including Python, Java, SQL, dbt, React, TypeScript, and Kubernetes, contributing to a fast-growing startup-like environment within Fivetran AI.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of programming experience across Python and/or Java.
• Experience with SQL and data warehouses (BigQuery, Snowflake, Databricks).
• Genuine willingness to work across the full stack: research, backend, frontend, SRE, and QA.
• Strong product and market awareness — able to judge which emerging techniques are worth building.
• Experience mentoring other engineers and influencing decisions beyond your team.
• Comfortable reading AI/ML research and turning findings into prototypes and production systems.

Responsibilities

• Research retrieval, reasoning, and agentic AI; shape roadmap.
• Prototype new ideas and ship production features.
• Define technical direction across multiple teams within Fivetran AI.
• Build and maintain backend and frontend systems for the AI product.

Skills

Mentoring engineers

Cross‑functional collaboration

Researching AI techniques

Product and market awareness

Full-stack willingness

Tools

Python

Java

SQL

dbt

BigQuery

Snowflake

Databricks

React

TypeScript

Kubernetes

Job description

Fivetran, Inc. is hiring a Staff R&D Software Engineer to join our AI team in Austin. You will research and prototype retrieval and agentic AI techniques, then ship production-grade features while driving cross-team technical direction. This role blends research, backend, frontend, SRE, and QA work with high ownership.

You’ll work with a stack including Python, Java, SQL, dbt, React, TypeScript, and Kubernetes, contributing to a fast-growing startup-like environment within Fivetran AI.