Remote GenAI Data Engineer: BigQuery & Dataflow

Nelnet; Columbia (SC); Remote; USD 115,000 - 135,000; Full time

Job summary

Nelnet is seeking a Data Engineer to own the data foundation underpinning its GenAI solutions for higher education and SLED clients. You will build and maintain data pipelines, classification, and governance to make client data safely usable by agentic AI on the Gemini Enterprise platform.

Working within the GenAI delivery team, you will implement pipelines on Google Cloud (BigQuery, Dataflow), ensure FERPA data handling, and partner with GCP engineers to deliver reliable, auditable data for AI

Qualifications

• Hands-on experience building data pipelines and ELT/ETL for analytics or GenAI on a major cloud data platform.
• Direct BigQuery and Dataflow (or Cloud Composer/Airflow) experience preferred; ramping on Google Cloud ok.
• Experience with data governance and classification tools (Dataplex, DLP) or equivalents.
• Knowledge of cloud storage, messaging and IAM concepts for Google Cloud.
• Google Cloud certification preferred (Professional Data Engineer).
• Strong SQL and Python for pipeline development and data transformation.
• Familiarity with FERPA and data privacy considerations for education or public sector data.
• Experience partnering with client teams to extract data from legacy or third-party systems.
• Ability to work from a scoped backlog translating technical requirements into pipelines.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain data pipelines using BigQuery and Dataflow.
• Ingest, transform, and serve client data for GenAI use cases.
• Monitor pipeline reliability, cost, and performance.
• Classify and tag data with Dataplex and DLP for FERPA data.
• Define data access controls and governance policies.
• Design data models and reusable schemas.
• Collaborate with client technical teams for data access.
• Document data flows, schemas, and classifications.
• Provide estimates and flag data-related delivery risks.
• Coordinate with GCP/Gemini Engineer and AgentOps.

Skills

SQL development

Python for data pipelines

Data governance

Data classification

Communication skills

Team collaboration

Education

Bachelor’s degree in related field

Tools

BigQuery

Dataflow

Cloud Composer

Dataplex

DLP

Collibra

Job description

Nelnet is seeking a Data Engineer to own the data foundation underpinning its GenAI solutions for higher education and SLED clients. You will build and maintain data pipelines, classification, and governance to make client data safely usable by agentic AI on the Gemini Enterprise platform.

Working within the GenAI delivery team, you will implement pipelines on Google Cloud (BigQuery, Dataflow), ensure FERPA data handling, and partner with GCP engineers to deliver reliable, auditable data for AI