GenAI Data Engineer — Cloud Pipelines & Governance

Nelnet; Baton Rouge (LA); Hybrid; USD 115,000 - 135,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, vision

401K and retirement

Tuition reimbursement

Wellness program

Job summary

Nelnet is seeking a Data Pipeline Engineer to design, build, and maintain data pipelines on Google Cloud for GenAI use cases in higher education and public sector clients. You will ingest, transform, and serve client data with a focus on FERPA compliance and governance.

You will collaborate with the Forward Deployed Engineer and GCP/Gemini teams to ensure data structure, access control, and data readiness for AI-enabled solutions, while monitoring performance and cost across engagements.

Qualifications

• Hands-on experience building data pipelines and ELT/ETL for analytics or GenAI use cases on a major cloud data platform.
• Direct experience with BigQuery and Dataflow (or Cloud Composer/Apache Airflow).
• Experience with data governance and classification tooling (Dataplex, DLP) and Google Cloud tools preferred.
• Strong SQL skills and Python for pipeline development and data transformation.
• Familiarity with FERPA and education/public sector data privacy considerations.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain data pipelines using BigQuery and Dataflow to ingest, transform, and serve client data for GenAI use cases.
• Build and maintain ELT/ETL processes for batch ingestion into analytics stores; ensure proper live-access segregation.
• Monitor pipeline reliability, performance, and cost; optimize BigQuery usage and Dataflow jobs.
• Classify and tag client data for AI readiness; enforce data access controls and governance policies.
• Collaborate with GCP/Gemini engineers and AgentOps for data structure, security, and delivery timelines.

Skills

SQL

Python

Data pipelines

BigQuery

Dataflow

GCP

Data governance

FERPA awareness

Education

Bachelor's degree or equivalent

Tools

BigQuery

Dataflow / Airflow

Dataplex

DLP

Cloud storage / IAM

Job description

Nelnet is seeking a Data Pipeline Engineer to design, build, and maintain data pipelines on Google Cloud for GenAI use cases in higher education and public sector clients. You will ingest, transform, and serve client data with a focus on FERPA compliance and governance.

You will collaborate with the Forward Deployed Engineer and GCP/Gemini teams to ensure data structure, access control, and data readiness for AI-enabled solutions, while monitoring performance and cost across engagements.