GenAI Data Engineer – Google Cloud Pipelines & Governance

Nelnet, Inc.; United States; On-site; USD 115,000 - 135,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical

Dental

Vision

HSA/FSA

401K

Life insurance

AD&D

Tuition reimbursement

Wellness program

Job summary

Nelnet, Inc. is seeking a Data Engineer to own the data foundation for GenAI solutions across higher education and public sector clients.

You will build ELT/ETL pipelines on Google Cloud, classify data with DLP and Dataplex, and ensure appropriate access controls and governance before AI use. You will collaborate with GCP Engineers, deliver data-ready structures for AI consumption, and surface compliance risks.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in related field or equivalent work experience.
• Hands-on experience building data pipelines and ELT/ETL processes for analytics or GenAI use cases on a major cloud data platform.
• Strong SQL skills and experience with Python for pipeline development and data transformation.
• Experience with data governance and classification tooling for sensitive data (e.g., Dataplex, DLP).
• Knowledge of FERPA and education/public sector data considerations.

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain ELT/ETL processes for batch ingestion into Google Cloud analytics and RAG data stores.
• Monitor pipeline reliability, performance, and cost; optimize BigQuery usage and Dataflow jobs.
• Classify and tag client data to identify sensitive data and enforce access controls.
• Define data models and schemas supporting current and reusable patterns across engagements.
• Maintain technical docs of data flows, schemas and classifications for audits.
• Execute against the delivery backlog with reliable data delivery and quality.
• Collaborate with GCP/Gemini engineers and AgentOps on data structure and security.

Skills

SQL development

Data pipeline design

Python

BigQuery/Dataflow

Google Cloud

Data governance

FERPA awareness

Data security

Data modeling

Communication

Education

Bachelor's degree in related field

Tools

Dataplex

Cloud Data Loss Prevention (DLP)

Cloud Composer/Apache Airflow

IAM

Job description

Nelnet, Inc. is seeking a Data Engineer to own the data foundation for GenAI solutions across higher education and public sector clients.

You will build ELT/ETL pipelines on Google Cloud, classify data with DLP and Dataplex, and ensure appropriate access controls and governance before AI use. You will collaborate with GCP Engineers, deliver data-ready structures for AI consumption, and surface compliance risks.