Senior Software Engineer(Tech-Lead)

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