cover_letter / art_4MQx0V0nQPU

Dear Fivetran Hiring Team, Fivetran has built something rare: infrastructure so reliable that data engineers trust it the way they trust electricity. The mission — making data access simple and canonical, with no ongoing maintenance burden — is exactly the kind of foundational problem I find most worth solving. My interest in this role is grounded in direct experience: at Intuit, I owned the developer platform that moved data and configuration across QuickBooks, TurboTax, Mint, Mailchimp, and Credit Karma at 675M+ engagements annually, and I know firsthand how much product clarity matters when engineering teams are operating at that scale. **Technical and Platform Foundation** My background spans both the infrastructure layer and the product layer of data platforms. At Intuit, I led the ICE Self-Service platform — a developer-facing data and configuration delivery system — scaling throughput from 6K to 50K TPS via an rSocket migration that supported approximately 1.5M concurrent connections at sub-25ms TP99. I worked directly in SQL and BigQuery to analyze telemetry and usage data across ~20 mobile apps and 30+ product SKUs, translating raw signal into prioritized roadmap decisions. I also built Asterias, a declarative asset lifecycle management platform with a GraphQL API, and led an enterprise-wide Service Language Assessment across nine languages to inform CTO-level strategic investment decisions. At Splunk, I owned Search Service (Go microservices), Search Catalog (PostgreSQL metadata), and Splunk Processing Language — product areas that sit squarely at the intersection of data infrastructure and developer tooling. I delivered the Scheduler Service end-to-end in approximately four months and led a query performance optimization initiative that achieved up to 10x improvements for a beta enterprise customer. On the AI and data pipeline side, I architected a RAG retrieval pipeline at Fintellect AI with ChromaDB vector store, multi-provider LLM orchestration across Claude, GPT-4, and Gemini with fallback routing, and structured output validation — work that required the same kind of data-flow thinking that reverse ETL demands, just applied to inference rather than analytics. **Why This Role** Reverse ETL represents the closing of the data loop: warehouses have become the system of record, and the next frontier is activating that data back into the operational tools where decisions actually happen. The Census acquisition positions Fivetran to own that full arc — ingest, transform, and activate — and the PM role at this junction is genuinely one of the more consequential product seats in the data ecosystem right now. Working directly with the Census founders to integrate and expand their product capabilities into Fivetran's platform is the kind of 0-to-1-within-an-established-leader challenge I find most energizing. **Role-Specific Connection** The JD calls out translating ambiguous technical customer feedback into product direction — this is work I have done repeatedly across enterprise developer platforms, where the signal is noisy, the personas are technical, and the stakes of a wrong prioritization decision are high. I am also drawn to the cross-functional scope: leading design, engineering, and product marketing toward a coherent product experience mirrors exactly how I operated at Intuit, where I partnered across platform, mobile, and DevPortal teams simultaneously. The opportunity to communicate product direction externally — in sales conversations and community channels — aligns with my experience as a DeveloperWeek 2022 speaker and Splunk .conf presenter. **Selected Prior Experience** - **Intuit — ICE Self-Service Platform:** Reduced developer onboarding from 2–3 weeks to minutes in pre-prod and under 24 hours for production; mitigated $1M+ in projected opex growth. Scaled to 675M+ engagements in FY23 across five major product lines. - **Intuit — Throughput Scaling:** Led rSocket migration supporting ~1.5M concurrent connections at sub-25ms TP99, scaling from 6K to 50K TPS — a direct analog to the reliability and scale expectations Fivetran's customers have for data pipelines. - **Intuit — SDK and Developer Tooling:** Extended Java and Python SDK Starter Kits with scaffolding templates, Gradle/Maven build configurations, testing frameworks, and CI/CD integration, enabling developers to reach production-ready microservices in minutes. - **Splunk — Search Infrastructure PM:** Owned Go microservice-based Search Service, PostgreSQL-backed Search Catalog, and SPL/SPL2 — built roadmaps, PRDs, and acceptance criteria for Splunk Cloud Services; delivered Scheduler Service end-to-end in ~4 months. - **Splunk — Performance Optimization:** Built mirrored Enterprise topology for benchmark testing and achieved up to 10x query performance improvements for a Fortune 500 beta customer. - **Fintellect AI — Data Pipeline Architecture:** Architected RAG retrieval pipeline with ChromaDB, multi-provider LLM orchestration with fallback routing, structured output validation, and token budget optimization — demonstrating hands-on data flow design beyond the PM layer. - **Intuit — Drift Detection Program:** Initiated MSaaS Drift Detection and Resolution: wrote a Java JAR library to scan Git repos for configuration drift, partnered with Design on DevPortal UI, and built remediation roadmap using OpenRewrite — a data-quality initiative with direct parallels to sync reliability in reverse ETL. **Closing** Fivetran's mission — data as reliable as electricity — is not a tagline; it is a hard engineering and product commitment that requires sustained discipline across every layer of the stack. Reverse ETL is where that commitment gets tested in the operational layer, where data has to arrive in the right place, in the right shape, at the right time, for business decisions to happen. I would bring to this role twelve years of platform product experience, direct hands-on data infrastructure work, and a track record of shipping developer-facing products that hold up at scale. I look forward to the conversation. Sincerely, **O. Felix Amoruwa** famoruwa@berkeley.edu | 909-731-9011 | felixamoruwa.info