GenAI Data Engineer - Remote (BigQuery/Dataflow)

Nelnet; Omaha (NE); Remote; USD 115,000 - 135,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical, dental, vision

HSA and FSA

401K

Employee stock purchase program

Tuition reimbursement

Wellness program

Job summary

Nelnet, a diversified student loan servicer and education solutions provider, is seeking a Data Pipeline Engineer to own the data foundation for GenAI initiatives. This role designs and maintains data pipelines on Google Cloud, focusing on safe, structured data for AI use while ensuring FERPA compliance.

Operating within the GenAI delivery team, you will translate requirements into production ELT/ETL jobs using BigQuery, Dataflow, and Airflow, monitor costs, and collaborate with GCP/Gemini and

Qualifications

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

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 of client source system data into analytics and RAG data stores.
• Monitor pipeline reliability, performance, and cost, optimizing BigQuery usage and Dataflow jobs.
• 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 education and SLED data.
• Design data models and schemas that support current and future client engagements.
• Maintain technical documentation of data flows, schemas, and classification decisions.
• Execute against the delivery backlog and provide data-related risk estimates.

Skills

Data pipelines

ELT/ETL

BigQuery

Dataflow

Python

SQL

GCP

Data governance

FERPA

DLP

Education

Bachelor’s degree in related field

Tools

Airflow

Dataplex

Google Cloud

Collibra

Alation

Cloud Composer

Job description

Nelnet, a diversified student loan servicer and education solutions provider, is seeking a Data Pipeline Engineer to own the data foundation for GenAI initiatives. This role designs and maintains data pipelines on Google Cloud, focusing on safe, structured data for AI use while ensuring FERPA compliance.

Operating within the GenAI delivery team, you will translate requirements into production ELT/ETL jobs using BigQuery, Dataflow, and Airflow, monitor costs, and collaborate with GCP/Gemini and