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dbt LabsDL

Staff Software Engineer - Semantic Layer

dbt Labs is on a mission to empower data practitioners to create and disseminate organizational knowledge.

dbt Labs

Employee count: 201-500

India only

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About Us

dbt Labs is the pioneer of analytics engineering, helping data teams transform raw data into reliable, actionable insights. Since 2016, we’ve grown from an open source project into the leading analytics engineering platform, now used by over 90,000 teams every week, driving data transformations and AI use cases.

As of February 2025, we’ve surpassed $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) and serve more than 5,400 dbt Platform customers, including AstraZeneca, Sky, Nasdaq, Volvo, JetBlue, and SafetyCulture.

We’re backed by top-tier investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, and Altimeter. At our core, we believe in empowering data practitioners:

  • Reliable, high-quality data is the fuel that propels AI-powered data engineering.

  • AI is changing data work, fast. dbt’s data control plane keeps data engineers ahead of that curve.
  • We empower engineers to deliver reliable, governed data faster, cheaper, and at scale.

dbt Labs is now synonymous with analytics engineering, defining the modern data stack and serving as the data control plane for enterprise teams around the world. And we’re just getting started.. We’re growing fast and building a team of passionate, curious people across the globe. Learn more about what makes us special by checking out our values.

About dbt Labs

Since 2016, dbt Labs has been on a mission to help analysts create and disseminate organizational knowledge. dbt has become an open-source standard, used by over 50,000 companies worldwide to transform data in their warehouses. Our work shapes how modern data teams operate, and we're now extending that impact from transformation into the semantic layer — the foundation for trusted, governed metrics across every analytics and AI workflow.

We're building a remote-first, globally distributed team, and we're growing our engineering presence in India to bring senior talent closer to the products defining the future of data.

About the Team

The Semantic Layer team owns the systems that turn dbt models into trusted, reusable business metrics. At the heart of this is MetricFlow — the open-source semantic engine that powers the dbt Semantic Layer. MetricFlow lets data teams define metrics once in code and consume them consistently across BI tools, notebooks, AI agents, and downstream applications.

This team is the steward of MetricFlow as an open-source project: shipping releases, reviewing community contributions, evolving the query compiler, and ensuring it integrates cleanly with the broader dbt ecosystem. You'll work at the intersection of language design, query compilation, and distributed data execution — solving problems that directly shape how thousands of organizations measure their business.

About the Role

We're hiring a Senior Software Engineer to join the Semantic Layer team in Bangalore. You'll be a core contributor to MetricFlow — designing features, optimizing query generation, hardening the open-source codebase, and partnering with the community of contributors and adopters around it. This is a high-ownership role: you'll write production code, drive technical decisions, and help shape the long-term architecture of one of the most important projects in the modern data stack.

What You'll Do

  • Design, build, and maintain core features of MetricFlow, including metric definitions, query compilation, dimensional modeling, and SQL generation across multiple data warehouses (Snowflake, BigQuery, Databricks, Redshift, and others).
  • Own MetricFlow as an open-source project — triage issues, review external pull requests, manage releases, and engage the community on GitHub and in Slack.
  • Collaborate with engineers across dbt Cloud, dbt Core, and the Semantic Layer service to ensure MetricFlow integrates seamlessly with the rest of the dbt ecosystem.
  • Improve performance, reliability, and observability of metric query execution at scale.
  • Partner with product, design, and developer-relations teammates to translate customer and community feedback into shipped improvements.
  • Write clear technical documentation, RFCs, and design docs that raise the bar for how the team thinks and ships.
  • Mentor other engineers through code review, pairing, and technical guidance.

What You'll Need

  • Strong professional software engineering experience, with a strong track record of shipping production systems.
  • Deep proficiency in Python, including modern typing, testing practices, and packaging.
  • Strong SQL fundamentals and a working understanding of how analytical query engines and data warehouses execute queries.
  • Experience designing systems that involve parsing, compilation, or transformation — for example: query planners, DSL compilers, type systems, or rule-based engines.
  • Solid grasp of software design principles: clean APIs, modularity, testability, and backwards compatibility.
  • Excellent written and verbal communication — you can explain complex tradeoffs clearly to engineers, PMs, and external community members.
  • Experience collaborating in a distributed, asynchronous team environment.

Nice to Have

  • Prior experience contributing to or maintaining a popular open-source project.
  • Familiarity with dbt, MetricFlow, LookML, Cube, or other semantic-layer technologies.
  • Background in data warehousing internals, query optimization, or analytical SQL dialects.
  • Experience with CI/CD, GitHub Actions, and release engineering for Python libraries.
  • Exposure to building developer-facing APIs, SDKs, or CLIs.

Why Join Us

  • Impact at scale: Your code will run inside the data platforms of tens of thousands of companies, including some of the world's largest enterprises.
  • Open-source ownership: You'll be a public, named maintainer of a foundational project — your work is visible, reviewed, and used by the global data community.
  • A team that values craft: We invest in design docs, code review, and durable engineering. We ship fast, but we don't ship sloppy.
  • Competitive compensation: Market-leading salary, equity, comprehensive health insurance, generous time off, learning & wellness stipends, and home-office support.

Our Commitment

dbt Labs is an equal-opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to building an inclusive environment for all employees. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.


If you're excited about shaping how the world's data teams define and share metrics — and you want to do it on a project that's open, ambitious, and used everywhere — we'd love to hear from you.

dbt Labs is an equal opportunity employer, committed to building an inclusive team that welcomes diverse perspectives, backgrounds, and experiences. Even if your experience doesn’t perfectly align with the job description, we encourage you to apply—we value potential just as much as a perfect resume.

Want to learn more about our focus on Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at dbt Labs? Check out our DEI page.

dbt Labs reserves the right to amend or withdraw the posting at any time. For employees outside the United States, dbt Labs offers a competitive benefits package. RSUs or comparable benefits may be offered depending on the legal or country limitations.

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About dbt Labs

Learn more about dbt Labs and their company culture.

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dbt Labs is on a mission to empower data practitioners to create and disseminate organizational knowledge.

Our values

Initially penned before the company was even founded, our values have been the foundation on which we've built a company, and a movement.

We are a mission-driven company. We believe that profits are an important tool in the pursuit of our mission, but they are not the mission itself.

We contribute to the knowledge loop. The highest goal of any human is to produce new knowledge that can subsequently be built upon by others. This is the process upon which every good thing in human society has been built. We participate in this most fundamental of human endeavors by thinking in public and defaulting to open source.

We are more concerned with value creation than value capture. We will only succeed if we create value in the world. If we optimize for that first, commercial success will follow.

Work done well is its own end. We do great work because it is an expression of who we are, a contribution of our unique talents and perspectives to a purpose larger than ourselves. Work done well creates ripples in the pond.

Transparency always wins. There are countless examples of choices that we all have in our professional lives of just how honest we want to be. We choose to be completely honest, even when that is uncomfortable, or even when it would lead to short-term negative consequences. We believe that transparency is a north star, and that acting transparently is always in the long-term best interests of achieving our mission.

We value diversity. People with different mindsets and experiences, working together, create better outcomes. This includes diversity of race and gender, as well as the diversity of academic backgrounds, socio-economic backgrounds, geographic backgrounds, ideologies, and interests.

Users are our best advocates. We market our products and services by working with amazing humans, making them incredibly happy, and asking them to spread the word. We go above and beyond for our clients / users to invest in our future growth.

We are humble. While we believe that we are building something exceptional, that knowledge does not make us feel proud, it makes us feel humble. It imbues us with a deep sense of responsibility towards our clients, coworkers, and the community at large.

We optimize for the long-term. While we pursue the mission with intense focus, we recognize that creating the change in the world that we wish to see will not happen overnight. We think, plan, and act for the long-term.

We work hard and go home. We take our responsibilities as parents, citizens, individuals, family members, and members of our various communities just as seriously as we take our commitments at work. When we are on, we are focused. When we are off, we are free to be fully disconnected.

We are human. We are human beings innovating in a shared service to a mission. We structure our compensation and benefits, work hours and location policies, work and management styles, and employee agreements to support this fundamental human-ness. We bring our whole selves to work, and we recognize that our identities extend beyond the work that we do.

We believe in moving up the stack. We believe that all team members should seek to replace themselves on an ongoing basis by building processes, technology, and documentation that obviate their existing work. We have an abundance mindset: there is always more, and more valuable, work to do. Moving up the stack presents growth opportunities for both the individual and the team.

Values are more important than success. We are not interested in success absent the values in this document. We have strongly held opinions on how a company should be built and these are non-negotiable. We do not believe that these opinions are an absolute truth, but they are an absolute truth for us.

Employee benefits

Learn about the employee benefits and perks provided at dbt Labs.

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Disability insurance

We provide long term and short term disability coverage to all US-based employees at no cost.

Healthcare benefits

We provide high-quality medical, dental, and vision benefits to all employees and their dependents.

Flexibility

We’re a distributed team and place a premium on trust. Communicate. Get your work done. Live your life.

Unlimited vacation

Take a spontaneous trip or plan a dream staycation. Unlimited vacation means that you can stop budgeting your PTO.

View dbt Labs's employee benefits
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