Associate Data Engineer 2027

About the role

Join IBM's Associate Program for university hires and collaborate with global clients on projects that drive digital transformation, cloud strategy, AI adoption, and process redesign. From day one, you'll work alongside a diverse cohort of peers, with access to industry-recognized certifications, digital badges, and a minimum of 40 hours of structured learning per year on IBM's AI-driven learning platform. IBM's culture of internal mobility allows you to explore new technologies, industries, and career paths as your interests evolve.

Responsibilities

• Assist in designing and implementing scalable data architecture and management systems tailored for modern cloud environments.
• Optimize existing data pipelines and processes for improved performance.
• Work with ETL/ELT ingestion pipelines.
• Collect and analyze data to identify trends, providing clients with actionable insights to enhance marketing, operational, and business practices.
• Participate in troubleshooting data-related issues, solving challenges and data inconsistencies.
• Create visually compelling and user-friendly data visualizations, dashboards, and reports to communicate findings to technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Ensure data integrity, accuracy, and reliability through rigorous cleaning, validation, and preprocessing procedures.
• Collaborate with project teams to prioritize and translate client requirements into operational scenarios (processes, models, use cases, plans, and solutions).
• Work with clients and architects to translate business requirements into solution requirements.
• Present analytical findings and recommendations clearly, demonstrating the value of data-driven decision-making.
• Analyze application portfolios to identify process optimization and automation opportunities using Agile methodologies.
• Demonstrate strong communication, problem-solving, adaptability, and teamwork skills.

Requirements

• Bachelor's Degree (required).
• Ability to incorporate statistical and machine learning techniques.
• Basic understanding of cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, etc.).
• Proficiency in programming languages like Java, Python, or Scala to build data pipelines.
• Experience with ETL/ELT tools, data integration, or federation tools for data transformation.
• Familiarity with tools such as Linux, SQL, Python, Spark, Hadoop, and Java.
• Exposure to ETL/ELT projects, data warehouse design, analytics pipelines, or capstone data engineering.
• Willingness to travel up to 100%, based on project requirements.

Preferred Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Data Science, Statistics, Math, MIS, or Engineering.
• Skills/Technologies: SQL, Python, dbt, Snowflake, BigQuery, Airflow, data modeling, CI/CD basics.
• Certifications: SnowPro Core, Databricks Data Engineer Associate, Google Associate Cloud Engineer, or Data Engineer coursework.
• GenAI literacy: prompt engineering, RAG, fine-tuning, and evaluation of generative models.

These positions are anticipated to start in 2027.