Staff Software Engineer, Metadata

Fivetran and dbt Labs are building data infrastructure and pipelines that help organizations move, transform, and trust their data. The Staff Software Engineer will provide technical leadership for the Metadata team, owning architecture and delivery of major subsystems including discovery APIs, catalog, lineage, and run history, while mentoring engineers and improving system quality, reliability, and performance.

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
• This is a full-time, remote position. We do expect the successful candidate to come to the Denver, CA office from time to time
• • 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