Staff Software Engineer, Metadata

Fivetran is a data infrastructure company helping organizations move, transform, and trust their data. The Staff Software Engineer will provide technical leadership for the Metadata team, owning subsystem architecture, leading complex cross-engineer projects, and improving design, code quality, reliability, and performance across metadata services.

Responsibilities:

• Lead the design and delivery of complex, team-level projects across the Metadata services, coordinating development across multiple engineers
• Independently design and develop the architecture of new subsystems, and own team-level subsystems end to end
• Use AI tooling and agents — across development and SDLC artifacts such as TDDs, PRDs, post-mortems, and test plans
• Review and approve technical designs, ensuring they meet a high quality bar, and identify design deficiencies before they ship
• Drive technical initiatives across the team's responsibility areas — discovery API, catalog, lineage, and run history
• Set and uphold design, architecture, and coding best practices, and hold teammates accountable for code quality
• Coach and mentor engineers, demonstrably improving the quality of code across the team
• Write technical specs, document common components, and keep the team accountable for necessary project documentation
• Fix and optimize critical parts of the codebase, drive incident follow-through, and advance the reliability and performance of the services you own
• Participate periodically in the on-call rotation

Requirements:

• 8+ years of software engineering experience with a track record of leading complex, team-scope technical work to completion
• Deep expertise designing and owning subsystems in distributed, cloud-based systems
• Demonstrated ability to set technical direction for a team and drive multi-engineer initiatives across an area of ownership
• Excellent design and architecture judgment; identifies design flaws in existing systems and proposes sound solutions with clear trade-offs
• Writes exemplary, well-tested code that serves as a model for others, and reliably estimates and delivers sprint to sprint
• Strong track record of raising quality through code review, coaching peers, and enforcing accepted engineering practices
• Experience partnering with QE on test strategy and owning operational health — incidents, post-mortems, reliability, and performance
• Proficiency in a modern backend or systems language such as Python, Java, C++, or C#
• Hands-on experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure), containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), and managing dev infrastructure
• Fluent in using AI code assistants and coding agents to generate and investigate code, and conversational AI (e.g. Claude, ChatGPT) to author, review, and synthesize SDLC artifacts — and able to model those practices for a team
• Experience in data processing (ETL, ELT) and/or cloud-based data platforms
• Experience architecting metadata, catalog, lineage, or discovery/search systems
• Experience with GraphQL APIs and high-throughput, multi-tenant data services
• Familiarity with the analytics engineering workflow and the dbt ecosystem