Principal Software Engineer - Data Lakes

From Fivetran’s founding until now, our mission has remained the same: to make access to data as simple and reliable as electricity. With Fivetran, customer data arrives in their warehouses, canonical and ready to query, with no engineering or maintenance required. We’re proud that more organizations continue to leverage our technology every day to become truly data-driven.

About Us

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.

About the Role

Fivetran is building data pipelines to power the modern data stack for thousands of companies.

We’re seeking a Principal Software Engineer to contribute to the technical architecture, design and development of Fivetran’s Managed Data Lake product offering. As part of a senior engineering team, you’ll partner with product and engineering teams to build scalable, high-performance systems, advance open-source technologies, and set technical standards that raise the bar across the organization.

This is a full-time remote position based out of Germany.

Technologies You’ll Use

• Java, C++, Postgres, Temporal, gRPC

• AWS, GCP, Azure, Kubernetes, Grafana

• Iceberg, Polaris, Delta Lake, Parquet, DuckDB

What You’ll Do

• Partner closely with product teams to understand requirements and design cutting-edge new capabilities that go directly into customer’s hands.

• Design, develop, implement, and operate highly reliable large-scale data lake systems in cooperation with a dedicated data lake engineering team.

• Contribute to open-source projects such as DuckDB and Polaris.

• Embrace Fivetran innovations with open-source standards and toolsets.

• Analyze fault-tolerance and high availability issues, performance and scale challenges, and solve them.

• Ensure operational excellence of the services and meet the commitments to our customers regarding security, reliability, availability, and performance.

• Set technical directions and influence cross-functional teams.

Skills We’re Looking For

• 6+ years of hands-on or research experience with high-performance relational data management systems.

• Deep understanding of infrastructure & software optimizations and performance engineering to drive significant performance, latency, and availability improvements.

• Proven track record of leading and delivering large and complicated projects.

• Strong development skills in Java and C++.

• Solid experience with public clouds (AWS, Azure, GCP).

• Demonstrated knowledge of columnar storage formats.

• Growth mindset and excitement about breaking the status quo by seeking innovative solutions.

• Excellent team player who is consistent in making everyone around you better.

Bonus Skills

• Strongly prefer an MS or PhD in Computer Science, ideally focusing on database management…