Manager, AI Data Engineering (UK Remote)

Overview

Turnitin, an AI-focused leader in the educational and research sectors, has been at the forefront of promoting academic integrity and innovation for over two decades. We are renowned for our cutting-edge solutions which have been embraced by thousands of academic institutions, corporations, and publishers worldwide.

At Turnitin, we believe in flexibility, offering remote working as a standard arrangement. We value diversity, respect local cultures, and honor individual choices. We are a remote-first employer, with an office in Newcastle (UK) and colleagues spanning the globe. Our team is diverse yet unified by a shared commitment to making a significant impact in education.

AI and data science are integral to our success and ambitious product roadmap, and great AI begins with great data. Joining us as an AI Data Engineer means you\’ll become part of a global team of proactive, supportive, and independent professionals committed to delivering sophisticated, well-structured AI and data systems. You’ll help pioneer our next generation data and AI pipelines to scale our team’s impact. Additionally, you\’ll collaborate with different teams within Turnitin to integrate AI and data science across a broad suite of products, designed to enhance learning, teaching, and academic integrity.

Responsibilities

In your role as AI Data Engineering and Data Science Manager, you’ll lead a team that owns all data collection and data curation for the AI team. There will be a particular emphasis on automated data collection and labeling using state of the art AI and LLMs. Creativity, collaboration, and a strong problem solving mindset will be critical to your success. The critical responsibilities of the AI Data Engineering and Data Science Manager will include:

• Leadership: Build and grow a team of AI data engineers, ensuring their growth and high performance.
• Strategy: Serve as a thought leader in data engineering, advising senior leadership on how to leverage AI-driven data engineering to create future-ready data and AI strategies.
• Communication: Ensure clarity of the company\\\’s vision and mission across the team and foster excellent communication within the organization.
• AI Data Engineering: Design, build, operate and deploy real-time data pipelines at scale using AI methods and best practices. Apply cutting edge data warehousing, data science and data engineering technologies to accelerate Turnitin’s AI R&D efforts. Identify strategic unlocks such as LLM agents to enable a faster time-to-market and better reusability of new AI initiatives.
• Collaboration: Cross-functionally partner with teams from across Turnitin and especially the AI R&D, Applied AI, and Data Platform teams to collect, create, curate and catalog high-quality AI datasets that drive our AI pipeline and help answer critical business questions. Ensure alignment and integration of data architecture and data models across different products and platforms
• Hands-on Involvement: Engage in data engineering and data science tasks as required to support the team. Lead external data collection efforts – including state of the art prompt engineering techniques – to support the construction of state of the art AI models.
• Innovation: Drive data innovation through research and development to unearth insights from Turnitin\’s rich data resources.
• Continuous Learning: Stay updated on new tools and development strategies in a rapidly evolving technical space, and bring innovation recommendations to leadership.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications;

• At least 5 years of experience in data engineering and data science, ideally focused on enabling and accelerating AI R&D.
• At least 2 years of experience in a managerial or technical leadership role, with responsibility covering large cross-functional projects.
• Strong proficiency in Python, SQL, and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CloudFormation), with additional experience in modern 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, with the ability to design scalable AI data systems and collaborate effectively in cross-functional teams.

Desired Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience in data engineering and data science, with a focus on AI and machine learning projects.
• 2+ years of experience 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 natural language processing, computer vision, or multimodal AI applications.
• Experience with data visualization (Streamlit) and data reporting.

Characteristics for Success

As an AI Data Engineering and Data Science Manager, you should have:

• A passion for creatively solving complex data problems.
• The ability to work collaboratively and cross-functionally, with strong leadership skills.
• A strong growth mindset and ability to constantly improve your skills and knowledge.
• Excellent track record of delivering results and ensuring a high level of quality.
• A desire to mentor, guide and grow high potential individual contributors.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
• A sense of curiosity about the problems at hand, the field at large, and the best solutions.
• Strong system-level problem-solving skills.

Additional Information

Total Rewards @ Turnitin
Turnitin maintains a Total Rewards package that is competitive within the local job market. People tend to think about their Total Rewards monetarily — solely as regular pay plus bonus or commission. This is what they earn in exchange for what they do. However, Turnitin delivers more than just these components. Beyond the intrinsic rewards of unleashing your potential to positively impact global education, and thriving in an organization that is free of politics and full of humble, inclusive and collaborative teammates, the extrinsic rewards at Turnitin include generous time off and health and wellness programs that offer choice and flexibility and provide a safety net for the challenges that life presents from time to time. Experience a remote-centric culture that empowers you to work with purpose and accountability in a way that best suits you, supported by a comprehensive package that prioritizes your overall well-being.

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

Our Values underpin everything we do.

• Customer Centric – We realize our mission to ensure integrity and improve learning outcomes by putting educators and learners at the center of everything we do.
• Passion for Learning – We seek out teammates that are constantly learning and growing and build a workplace which enables them to do so.
• Integrity – We believe integrity is the heartbeat of Turnitin. It shapes our products, the way we treat each other, and how we work with our customers and vendors.
• Action & Ownership – We have a bias toward action and empower teammates to make decisions.
• One Team – We strive to break down silos, collaborate effectively, and celebrate each other’s successes.
• Global Mindset – We respect local cultures and embrace diversity. We think globally and act locally to maximize our impact on education.

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

At Turnitin, we recognize it’s unrealistic for candidates to fulfill 100% of the criteria in a job ad. We encourage you to apply if you meet the majority of the requirements because we know that skills evolve over time. If you’re willing to learn and evolve alongside us, join our team!

Turnitin, LLC is committed to the policy that all persons have equal access to its programs, facilities and employment. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, or status as a protected veteran.