Senior Staff Software Engineer
About The Position
Fivetran and dbt Labs are merging, bringing together two industry leaders with a shared goal: to help organizations maximize the value of their data. Together, they are creating the data infrastructure layer that facilitates data movement, transformation, and trust, from initial movement through every transformation to the context needed by teams and AI systems. Fivetran specializes in automating data movement across various systems and clouds, while dbt Labs pioneered analytics engineering, enabling teams to transform data into reliable, governed insights. This combined entity supports thousands of organizations in building a trusted foundation for analytics, AI, and informed business decisions. The integration aims to create a company with the scale, talent, and technology to empower more organizations to leverage their data with increased speed, confidence, and impact. During this transition, candidates may encounter references to both Fivetran and dbt Labs in the recruitment process as teams, systems, and career sites are integrated. This role seeks a senior-level technical leader responsible for architecting, building, and leading the Semantic Layer. This service transforms raw warehouse data into consistent, reusable metrics and analytical models that customers can trust across their organization. The position will drive the architecture and long-term technical direction of the semantic layer, enhancing its performance, reliability, and analytical capabilities to enable customers to query their data effectively and receive fast, accurate answers. Responsibilities span designing modeling and query semantics, building and optimizing the query execution engine, and operating sync and compute services on a global Kubernetes compute cluster. The role also includes ensuring the technical excellence of the team and its services through code reviews, architectural design contributions, and mentoring junior colleagues.
Requirements
- 8+ years of experience in the software industry with a passion for solving complex software engineering problems, including experience designing and developing reusable libraries, services, and platforms from scratch leveraging industry best practices
- Experience working with distributed systems and cloud security concepts
- Strong proficiency in Python and SQL, with deep experience working with relational databases (Postgres) and data warehouses
- Demonstrated ability to write well-structured and performant code
- Ability to independently lead software and infrastructure design to satisfy project requirements
- Can identify design flaws in existing systems and come up with improvements
- Experience in code reviews, design, troubleshooting, and testing
- Hands-on experience working with cloud technologies (AWS, GCP) and containerization methodologies like Docker and Kubernetes
- Experience interacting with continuous integration tools like BuildKite; knowledge of observability tools like Grafana is a plus
- Understand how to use AI code assist and coding agents to automatically generate code for features, bugs, testing, and investigation, and use conversational AI systems (like Claude, ChatGPT, and internal chatbots) to support researching, authoring, reviewing, and synthesizing SDLC artifacts such as TDDs, PRDs, Postmortems, Test Plans, and Proposals
Nice To Haves
- Experience building semantic layers, metrics layers, or BI/analytics modeling tools
- Experience with query engines or query optimization (DuckDB, Spark, or similar)
- Experience in data processing (ETL, ELT) and/or cloud-based data platforms
- Experience designing query languages, DSLs, or analytical APIs
- Open-source contributions to data or analytics tooling
Responsibilities
- Design, build, and lead the architecture of Fivetran's semantic layer, defining the modeling and query semantics that power metrics and analytics across customer data
- Independently design and implement features and performance improvements to create highly scalable distributed data systems on the cloud
- Develop, maintain, and test code
- Drive technical direction and architectural designs across the team and owned services
- Conduct design and code reviews
- Understand and fix challenges related to performance and scalability of query execution over large data warehouses
- Collaborate with peers, product managers, customer support, and other stakeholders to deliver the best product with high quality, performance, and scalability
- Participate periodically in on-call rotation
- Participate in the hiring process
- Mentor junior developers and make Fivetran the most reliable and secure component of our customers' data infrastructure
Benefits
- 100% employer-paid medical insurance
- Generous paid time-off policy (PTO), plus paid sick time, inclusive parental leave policy, holidays, and volunteer days off
- RSU stock grants
- Professional development and training opportunities
- Company virtual happy hours, free food, and fun team-building activities
- Monthly cell phone stipend
- Access to an innovative mental health support platform that offers personalized care and resources in areas such as: therapy, coaching, and self-guided mindfulness exercises for all covered employees and their covered dependents.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
