Manager, AI Data Engineering (UK Remote)

Overview

Company: Turnitin – a recognized innovator in the global education space. For over 25 years, Turnitin has partnered with educational institutions to promote honesty, consistency, and fairness across all subject areas and assessment types. Our services are used by over 21,000 academic institutions, publishers, and corporations: Feedback Studio, Originality, Gradescope, ExamSoft, Similarity, and iThenticate. Turnitin supports a remote-centric culture that prioritizes well-being and accountability, with a diverse team unified to make a difference in education. Turnitin is a global organization with team members in over 35 countries.

Job Description: AI and data science are integral to Turnitin’s success and ambitious product roadmap. As an AI Data Engineering Manager, you will join a global team of proactive, supportive, and independent professionals delivering sophisticated data and AI systems. You will help pioneer our next generation data and AI pipelines to scale impact and collaborate with teams across Turnitin to integrate AI and data science into a broad suite of products that enhance learning, teaching, and academic integrity.

Responsibilities

• Lead a team that owns all data collection and data curation for the AI team, with emphasis on automated data collection and labeling using state-of-the-art AI and LLMs.
• Build and grow a team of AI data engineers and ensure their growth and high performance.
• Serve as a thought leader in data engineering, advising senior leadership on AI-driven data strategies.
• Ensure clarity of the company’s vision and mission within the team and foster cross-organizational communication.
• Design, build, operate and deploy real-time data pipelines at scale using AI methods; apply advanced data warehousing, data science and data engineering technologies to accelerate AI R&D; identify strategic unlocks (e.g., LLM agents) to speed time-to-market and improve reusability.
• Cross-functionally partner with AI R&D, Applied AI, and Data Platform teams to collect, create, curate and catalog high-quality AI datasets; align data architecture and models across products and platforms.
• Engage in data engineering and data science tasks as needed; lead external data collection efforts using state-of-the-art prompt engineering for AI model construction.
• Drive data innovation through R&D to extract insights from Turnitin’s data resources.
• Stay updated on new tools and development strategies and bring innovation recommendations to leadership.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

• At least 5 years of experience in data engineering and data science, focused on enabling AI R&D.
• At least 2 years in a managerial or technical leadership role with responsibility for large cross-functional projects.
• Strong proficiency in Python, SQL, and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation); experience with orchestration frameworks (Airflow, Prefect, or dbt).
• Proficiency with cloud-native data platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) and vector databases (Pinecone, Weaviate, Qdrant, or Chroma).
• Experience with MLOps tools and platforms (HuggingFace, SageMaker Bedrock, Vertex AI), experiment tracking (MLflow, Weights & Biases), and model deployment pipelines.
• Experience with Large Language Models (LLMs), embedding generation, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems, and frameworks for orchestrating LLM interaction (LiteLLM, LangFuse, LangChain, LlamaIndex).
• Strong problem-solving, analytical and communication skills; ability to design scalable AI data systems and collaborate across teams.

Desired Qualifications:

• 7+ years of experience in data engineering and data science, focusing on AI and ML projects.
• 2+ years in a managerial or technical leadership role.
• Experience in education, EdTech, or academic integrity sectors.
• Experience using AI coding tools (Cursor, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot) for accelerated development.
• Familiarity with NLP, computer vision, or multimodal AI applications.
• Experience with data visualization (Streamlit) and data reporting.

Characteristics for Success

• Passion for creatively solving complex data problems.
• Ability to work collaboratively and cross-functionally with strong leadership skills.
• Growth mindset and commitment to continual learning.
• Track record of delivering results with high quality.
• Desire to mentor and grow high-potential contributors.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• Curiosity about problems, the field, and the best solutions.
• Strong system-level problem-solving abilities.

Additional Information

Total Rewards @ Turnitin: Turnitin’s Total Rewards package is competitive within the local job market and includes generous time off and health and wellness programs, remote-centric culture, and a comprehensive package prioritizing well-being.

Our Mission: to ensure the integrity of global education and improve learning outcomes.

Our Values:

• Customer Centric – placing educators and learners at the center of everything we do.
• Passion for Learning – encouraging continuous learning and growth.
• Integrity – integrity as the heartbeat of Turnitin.
• Action & Ownership – bias toward action and decision empowerment.
• One Team – collaboration and shared success.
• Global Mindset – respect for local cultures and diverse global impact.

Global Benefits:

• Remote First Culture
• Health Care Coverage*
• Education Reimbursement*
• Competitive Paid Time Off
• 4 Self-Care Days per year
• National Holidays*
• 2 Founder Days + Juneteenth Observed
• Paid Volunteer Time*
• Charitable contribution match*
• Monthly Wellness or Home Office Reimbursement*
• Access to Modern Health (mental health platform)
• Parental Leave*
• Retirement Plan with match/contribution*

* varies by country

Seeing Beyond the Job Ad

Turnitin recognizes it’s unrealistic to fulfill 100% of the criteria. Apply if you meet the majority of requirements and are willing to learn and evolve with us.

Turnitin, LLC is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or status as a protected veteran.