Data Engineer – New Grad – Alation
Alation is the market leader in enterprise data intelligence — providing the AI-powered data catalog that 550+ companies including Tesla, Salesforce, and the US Air Force use to discover, understand, govern, and trust their data. Alation's data catalog uses machine learning to automatically catalog metadata, surface popular datasets, and recommend trusted data sources to analysts — reducing the time data teams spend searching for the right data from days to minutes. With $340M+ raised and a $1.2B valuation, Alation is defining the future of data governance and data intelligence. We are hiring New Grad Data Engineers to build the metadata infrastructure powering Alation's data catalog platform.
Responsibilities
- Build Alation's data source connectors — implementing metadata extraction from data warehouses (Snowflake, Redshift, BigQuery), databases (Oracle, SQL Server), and BI tools (Tableau, Looker)
- Develop Alation's Query Log Ingestion (QLI) pipeline — processing SQL query history from connected data sources to power Alation's usage analytics and Steward recommendations
- Implement Alation's lineage graph backend — building automated data lineage extraction from SQL parsing and dbt manifest integration
- Build Alation's data quality integration framework connecting Great Expectations, Monte Carlo, and Soda quality test results to the Alation catalog
- Develop Alation's search and discovery indexing pipeline — processing metadata from 550+ enterprise catalogs into Alation's Elasticsearch-powered search index
- Build REST APIs and webhooks enabling Alation's integrations with dbt Cloud, Apache Atlas, and enterprise data governance platforms
Requirements
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or Data Engineering
- Strong Python and SQL skills for metadata pipeline development
- Understanding of data catalog concepts, metadata management, and data governance principles
- Familiarity with cloud data warehouses (Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift) and BI platforms
- Experience with Elasticsearch, graph databases, or knowledge graph concepts is a plus
Benefits
- Competitive salary with Alation pre-IPO equity
- Alation platform access and data intelligence certification paths
- Medical, dental, and vision benefits
- 401(k) with Alation matching
- Redwood City, CA headquarters with hybrid flexibility and startup innovation culture