Associate Data Engineer 2026 – Data Services

Introduction

You'll work with visionaries across multiple industries to improve the hybrid cloud and AI journey for the most innovative and valuable companies in the world. Your ability to accelerate impact and make meaningful change for your clients is enabled by our strategic partner ecosystem and our robust technology platforms across the IBM portfolio; including Software and Red Hat.

Curiosity and a constant quest for knowledge serve as the foundation to success in IBM Consulting. In your role, you'll be encouraged to challenge the norm, investigate ideas outside of your role, and come up with creative solutions resulting in ground breaking impact for a wide network of clients. Our culture of evolution and empathy centers on long-term career growth and development opportunities in an environment that embraces your unique skills and experience.

As an Associate Consultant, you will develop and apply analytical, interpersonal, creative thinking, problem-solving, and leadership skills from day one. This generalist role allows you to learn and apply foundational skills in data analytics and data engineering while working closely with some of the best professionals in the industry.

Your role and responsibilities

* Works with clients to advocate business process transformation, analyzes the application portfolio across ecosystem to understand the process optimization and automation opportunity and proposes end-to-end process transformation journey, including reimagined process/workflow models, improving business value and outcomes that meet the client objectives, with agility and flexibility.
* Prioritizes and translates Client requirements and defines current and future operational scenarios (processes, models, use cases, plans and solutions) and works with Client business and the Architect to ensure proper translation of business requirements to solution requirements.

These positions are anticipated to start in 2026. We have positions open in these locations:
* Atlanta, GA
* Austin, TX
* Chicago, IL

* Dallas, TX
* Houston, TX

Key Responsibilities May Include:

• Assist in designing and implementing scalable data architecture and management systems tailored for modern cloud environments. 
• Work on optimizing 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, working to solve challenges and data inconsistencies. 
• Create visually compelling and user-friendly data visualizations, dashboards, and reports to effectively communicate findings to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Ensure the integrity, accuracy, and reliability of data through rigorous data cleaning, validation, and preprocessing procedures.
• Work with project team to prioritize and translate Client requirements and define current and future operational scenarios (processes, models, use cases, plans and solutions). Work collaboratively with Client and the Architect to ensure proper translation of business requirements to solution requirements.
• Present analytical findings and recommendations clearly and concisely, demonstrating the value of data-driven decision-making to clients.
• Work with cross-functional teams to tackle complex business problems, utilizing your data expertise to drive innovative solutions.
• Stay informed about the latest trends and advancements in the modern data stack, bringing new ideas and best practices to the team.
• Consulting Skills:
• Works with clients to advocate business process transformation, analyzes the application portfolio across ecosystem to understand the process optimization and automation opportunity.
• Strong communication skills and ability to articulate thoughts clearly and concisely.
• Problem-solving mindset with the ability to ask questions, seek to understand, and recommend solutions.
• Curious and eager to learn new skills, with the ability to adapt to changes easily.
• Planning capabilities with an understanding of basic project management skills and Agile methodology.
• Strong teamwork orientation, contributing positively to a collaborative environment.

Required education

High School Diploma/GED

Preferred education

Bachelor's Degree

Required technical and professional expertise

*Experience: ETL/ELT projects, data warehouse design, analytics pipelines, capstone data engineering

*Skills/Tech: SQL, Python, dbt, Snowflake, BigQuery, Airflow, data modeling, CI/CD basics

* Skills include a range of package workflow tool experience including on one of the following IBM BAW, Lombardi, iLog, Appian, Pega etc.

* Data Engineer skills- pipeline design, infrastructure, vector databases, deployment, and scalability.

*Other: strong analytical mindset, data governance, or data quality exposure 

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

Preferred technical and professional experience

*Bachelor’s degree in a related field (Computer Science, Data Science, Statistics, Math, MIS, Engineering).

*Minimum of 1 year of practical project experience or relevant training.

*Certifications: SnowPro Core, Google Associate Cloud Engineer or Data Engineer coursework

*General skills: GenAI literacy - prompt engineering, RAG, fine-tuning, and evaluation of generative models.

ABOUT BUSINESS UNIT

IBM Consulting is IBM’s consulting and global professional services business, with market leading capabilities in business and technology transformation. With deep expertise in many industries, we offer strategy, experience, technology, and operations services to many of the most innovative and valuable companies in the world. Our people are focused on accelerating our clients’ businesses through the power of collaboration. We believe in the power of technology responsibly used to help people, partners and the planet.

YOUR LIFE @ IBM

In a world where technology never stands still, we understand that, dedication to our clients success, innovation that matters, and trust and personal responsibility in all our relationships, lives in what we do as IBMers as we strive to be the catalyst that makes the world work better.

Being an IBMer means you’ll be able to learn and develop yourself and your career, you’ll be encouraged to be courageous and experiment everyday, all whilst having continuous trust and support in an environment where everyone can thrive whatever their personal or professional background.

Our IBMers are growth minded, always staying curious, open to feedback and learning new information and skills to constantly transform themselves and our company. They are trusted to provide on-going feedback to help other IBMers grow, as well as collaborate with colleagues keeping in mind a team focused approach to include different perspectives to drive exceptional outcomes for our customers. The courage our IBMers have to make critical decisions everyday is essential to IBM becoming the catalyst for progress, always embracing challenges with resources they have to hand, a can-do attitude and always striving for an outcome focused approach within everything that they do.

Are you ready to be an IBMer?