Senior Software Engineer

Alation is pioneering the next era of data intelligence - powered by AI agents and trusted data. Organizations around the world rely on Alation to drive self-service analytics, cloud transformation, data governance, and AI innovation. Our technology helps enterprises connect people and data to make faster, smarter, and more confident decisions. With more than $340M in funding - valued at over $1.7 billion and more than 650 customers, including 40% of the Fortune 100.

As data becomes the foundation of every business, Alation is leading the way in helping organizations unlock their full potential. By bringing intelligence, automation, and trust to every interaction, we empower customers to scale data-driven innovation with confidence and speed.

Joining Alation means being part of a winning team shaping the future of AI-powered data intelligence. We move fast, think big, and deliver results together.

Job Description:

About the Role

Are you ready to be a force multiplier in an AI-first engineering culture? As an SE4 at Alation, you won’t just own components-you’ll define the technical bar and shape the future of our data connector ecosystem. This is a high-autonomy, high-impact role where you’ll tackle the most ambitious technical challenges, influence broad architectural decisions, and empower everyone around you to excel. We’re looking for a visionary technical leader who thrives on ambiguity and is passionate about scaling business-critical systems for the world’s largest enterprise customers.

Your Impact & Challenges

• Architect and Lead: Drive the design of complex, multi-service features from concept through delivery, ensuring they are robust, scalable, and secure.

• Elevate Standards: Set the gold standard for code quality, testing discipline, and performance benchmarks that the entire team will follow.

• Navigate Ambiguity: Decompose large-scale initiatives into actionable engineering milestones, keeping the team unblocked and moving with velocity.

• Cultivate Talent: Act as a dedicated mentor, growing the next generation of engineers through thoughtful code reviews and technical partnership.

• Solve the Unsolvable: Be the point of escalation for our most complex customer issues, driving root cause analysis and permanent resolutions.

• Innovate with AI: Master and champion AI-native engineering tools like Claude Code and GitHub Copilot to accelerate shipping while maintaining elite quality.

• Govern AI Integration: Establish the patterns for prompting and review that balance rapid velocity with production-grade reliability.

• Shape the Team: Calibrate our hiring bar and help us identify the talent needed to scale our mission.

• Broaden Influence: Serve as a credible, strategic voice in architectural discussions across the entire organization.

What You Bring

• Over 8 years of professional experience crafting and shipping production software or n-tier services at scale.

• Exceptional skills in object-oriented design, with deep expertise in Java (our primary stack) and/or Python & Go.

• A proven track record of delivering end-to-end systems, including cross-service integrations and extensibility frameworks.

• A talent for technical writing and architectural leadership, with the ability to win peer buy-in for your designs.

• A productivity-first mindset using AI coding assistants (Cursor, Copilot, etc.) to enhance your workflow without sacrificing critical judgment.

• Experience modeling AI-augmented habits for your peers, sharing techniques that help the whole team level up.

• Expertise in microservices and distributed systems that are built for resilience.

• Strong communicative clarity, capable of translating deep technical complexity for anyone from a peer to a non-technical stakeholder.

• Passion for technical leadership and a history of successfully mentoring other engineers.

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related technical field.

Bonus Points

• Experience building or maintaining data connectors, ETL pipelines, or metadata extraction frameworks

• Working experience with Kubernetes and/or Docker in a production context

• Exposure to JDBC, ODBC, or vendor-specific APIs for enterprise data platforms (Snowflake, Databricks, SAP, etc.)

• Familiarity with data catalog concepts - metadata, lineage, data quality

• Experience with Airflow

• Exposure to data modeling in RDBMS

Alation, Inc. is an Equal Employment Opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regards to that individual’s race, color, religion or creed, national origin or ancestry, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, gender identity, age, physical or mental disability, veteran status, genetic information, ethnicity, citizenship, or any other characteristic protected by law.

The Company will strive to provide reasonable accommodations to permit qualified applicants who have a need for an accommodation to participate in the hiring process (e.g., accommodations for a job interview) if so requested.

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