Dallas Hiring Associate Data Engineer 2027

Associate Data Engineer at IBM

Come forge the future like an IBMer. IBM's Associate Program for university hires lets you work with some of the world's most recognized brands and start your career. From day one, you'll collaborate with global clients on projects that help organizations tackle digital transformation, cloud strategy, AI adoption, and process redesign, alongside a global cohort of diverse, ambitious peers.

Associates have 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, plus coaches, mentors, and professional communities across practices. IBM's internal mobility culture lets you explore new technologies, industries, and career paths as your interests change.

We advise applying only to roles that match your skills and experience, rather than applying broadly across entry-level positions. You'll receive a status update email for each application, so check your IBM Careers account regularly to see all your active applications.

Role Overview

As an Associate Data Engineer, you'll use data to uncover meaningful stories and patterns. You'll contribute to data gathering, storage, and both batch and real-time processing, help choose suitable data management systems, and identify the data needed for analysis. You'll also tackle database integration challenges and work with complex, unstructured data sets. These positions are anticipated to start in 2027.

Key Responsibilities

• Assist in designing and implementing scalable data architecture and management systems for modern cloud environments.
• Optimize existing data pipelines and processes for better performance.
• Work with ETL/ELT ingestion pipelines.
• Collect and analyze data to identify trends and give clients actionable insights to improve marketing, operational, and business practices.
• Troubleshoot data-related issues and resolve challenges and data inconsistencies.
• Create clear data visualizations, dashboards, and reports for technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Ensure data integrity, accuracy, and reliability through data cleaning, validation, and preprocessing.
• Work with the project team and the Client and Architect to translate client requirements into solution requirements and define current and future operational scenarios.
• Present analytical findings and recommendations clearly and concisely, showing the value of data-driven decisions to clients.

Consulting Skills

• Analyze application portfolios to find process optimization and automation opportunities, using planning, project management, and Agile methods.
• Communicate clearly, solve problems, adapt, and work as a team, with curiosity to learn and the ability to ask insightful questions and recommend solutions.
• Apply a variety of statistical and machine learning techniques.
• Understand cloud platforms such as AWS and Azure at a basic level.
• Use programming languages such as Java, Python, and Scala to build pipelines that extract and transform data.
• Use ETL tools and data integration or federation tools to prepare data.
• Work with Linux, SQL, Python, Spark, Hadoop, and Java.
• Gain exposure to ETL/ELT projects, data warehouse design, analytics pipelines, and capstone data engineering.

Willingness to travel up to 100%, based on project requirements.

Preferred Skills and Certifications

Preferred skills include SQL, Python, dbt, Snowflake, BigQuery, Airflow, data modeling, and CI/CD basics. Preferred certifications include SnowPro Core, Databricks Data Engineer Associate, Google Associate Cloud Engineer, or Data Engineer coursework. General skills include GenAI literacy, such as prompt engineering, RAG, fine-tuning, and evaluation of generative models.