Senior Staff Software Engineer

About the Role

Fivetran and dbt Labs are bringing together two industry-leading companies with a shared mission: helping organizations unlock the full value of their data. Together, we’re delivering the data infrastructure layer that helps organizations move, transform, and trust their data — from the moment data moves, through every transformation, to the context teams and AI systems rely on. Fivetran helps organizations automate data movement across the systems, clouds, engines, and tools they rely on. dbt Labs pioneered analytics engineering, helping teams transform data into reliable, governed insights. Together, we support thousands of organizations as they build a trusted foundation for analytics, AI, and better business decisions. As we bring our teams and technology together, we’re building on the strengths of both companies while continuing to deliver the products and experiences our customers know and trust. It’s an exciting time to join us: we’re creating a company with the scale, talent, and technology to help more organizations put their data to work with greater speed, confidence, and impact. During this transition period, you may see references to both Fivetran and dbt Labs throughout our recruiting process as we integrate our teams, systems, and career sites.

We're looking for a senior-level technical leader to architect, build, and lead our Semantic Layer, the service that turns our customers' raw warehouse data into consistent, reusable metrics and analytical models they can trust across their entire organization.

You'll drive the architecture and long-term technical direction of the semantic layer, raising the bar for its performance, reliability, and analytical power so customers can ask any question of their data and get a fast, correct answer.

The work is very diverse, all the way from designing the modeling and query semantics, to building and optimizing the query execution engine, to operating sync and compute services on our global Kubernetes compute cluster. You'll also be responsible for ensuring the technical excellence of your team and owned services, by reviewing code, contributing to architectural designs, and mentoring your junior colleagues.

This is a full-time, fully remote position.

Technologies You’ll Use

Python, Postgres, DuckDB, Data Warehouses, Kubernetes, Docker, GCP, BuildKite, Grafana

What You’ll Do

- 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

Skills We’re Looking For

- 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

Bonus Skills​

- 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

#LI-REMOTE #LI-DJ1