Remote GenAI Data Engineer — Data Pipelines & Governance

Nelnet; Hastings (NE); Hybrid; USD 115,000 - 135,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical coverage

Dental coverage

Vision coverage

HSA/FSA

401K

Life insurance

Employee stock purchase program

Tuition reimbursement

Wellness program

Job summary

Nelnet is seeking a Data Pipeline Engineer to design, build, and run data pipelines for GenAI use across higher education and SLED data. You will work with BigQuery, Dataflow, and Airflow to ingest, transform, and serve client data while enforcing FERPA-compliant governance and access controls.

The role emphasizes ELT/ETL development, data readiness assessment, and collaboration with GCP/Gemini Enterprise Engineers plus the Forward Deployed Engineer to meet data structure and freshness

Qualifications

• Hands-on experience building data pipelines and ELT/ETL on a cloud data platform (BigQuery/Dataflow).
• Experience with data governance and classification tooling (Dataplex, DLP) for sensitive data.
• Cloud storage, messaging, and access-control concepts; familiarity with Google's tools preferred.
• Google Cloud certification preferred (Professional Data Engineer).
• Strong SQL and Python for pipeline development and data transformation.
• Knowledge of FERPA and data privacy considerations for education data.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, and maintain data pipelines for GenAI use cases on Google Cloud.
• Develop ELT/ETL processes ingesting data from SIS/ERP into analytics data stores.
• Monitor pipeline reliability, performance, and cost; optimize for scale.
• Define data models and schemas supporting current and reusable patterns.
• Collaborate with GCP/Gemini Engineers and AgentOps counterpart on data readiness.
• Maintain documentation of data flows, classifications, and governance decisions.
• Perform data quality reviews and risk assessments prior to AI use.

Skills

SQL development

Python for pipelines

Data governance

Data modeling

GCP/Gemini

Data security

Education

Bachelor’s degree or equivalent

Tools

BigQuery

Dataflow

Cloud Composer/Airflow

Dataplex

Cloud DLP

Google Cloud

SSIS

C#.NET

PostgreSQL

JIRA

Job description

Nelnet is seeking a Data Pipeline Engineer to design, build, and run data pipelines for GenAI use across higher education and SLED data. You will work with BigQuery, Dataflow, and Airflow to ingest, transform, and serve client data while enforcing FERPA-compliant governance and access controls.

The role emphasizes ELT/ETL development, data readiness assessment, and collaboration with GCP/Gemini Enterprise Engineers plus the Forward Deployed Engineer to meet data structure and freshness