GenAI Data Engineer (Remote) – BigQuery & Data Pipelines

Nelnet; Charleston (WV); Hybrid; USD 115,000 - 135,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical insurance

Dental insurance

Vision insurance

HSA/FSA

Paid time off

401K/Student loan repayment

Life insurance

AD&D insurance

Employee assistance program

Employee stock purchase program

Tuition reimbursement

Performance-based incentive pay

Short- and long-term disability

Wellness program

Job summary

Nelnet is seeking a Data Pipeline Engineer to own data foundations behind GenAI solutions for higher education and public sector clients. You will design, build, and govern data pipelines on Google Cloud, ensuring data is structured, classified, and access-controlled for AI use.

The role requires hands-on ELT/ETL work, data governance, and collaboration with GCP/Gemini teams to support agentic AI applications while maintaining FERPA compliance and data security.

Qualifications

• Hands-on experience building data pipelines and ELT/ETL processes for analytics or GenAI use cases on a major cloud data platform (e.g., BigQuery, Snowflake, Redshift, Synapse) — required.
• Direct experience with BigQuery and Dataflow (or Cloud Composer/Apache Airflow) strongly preferred; candidates with strong GenAI/AI-adjacent data engineering experience on other platforms who can ramp quickly on Google Cloud will be considered.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain data pipelines using BigQuery and Dataflow (or Cloud Composer/Apache Airflow) to ingest, transform, and serve client data for GenAI use cases.
• Build and maintain ELT/ETL processes for batch ingestion of client source system data into Google Cloud analytics and RAG data stores.
• Monitor pipeline reliability, performance, and cost, optimizing BigQuery usage and Dataflow jobs as engagements scale.
• Classify and tag client data using Dataplex and DLP to identify sensitive data prior to AI use.
• Define and enforce data access controls and governance policies for higher education and SLED data.
• Assess data readiness for AI use cases and flag gaps in quality or governance.

Skills

SQL development

Python

Data governance

BigQuery

Dataflow

GCP

Education

Bachelor’s degree in related field

Tools

BigQuery

Dataflow

Cloud Composer/Apache Airflow

Dataplex

DLP

Job description

Nelnet is seeking a Data Pipeline Engineer to own data foundations behind GenAI solutions for higher education and public sector clients. You will design, build, and govern data pipelines on Google Cloud, ensuring data is structured, classified, and access-controlled for AI use.

The role requires hands-on ELT/ETL work, data governance, and collaboration with GCP/Gemini teams to support agentic AI applications while maintaining FERPA compliance and data security.