Job Title: Palantir Data Engineer (Remote)
Location: Washington, DC
Duration: 12 Months
Job Description:
- Palantir Data Engineer design, build, and operate ontology-driven data products in Palantir Foundry (SaaS). This role emphasizes semantic data modeling, entity-centric design, and ontology-backed analytics and operational workflows, rather than pure pipeline engineering alone.
- You will work closely with product owners, analysts, and mission stakeholders to translate real-world domains-such as case management, operations, and reporting-into well-governed ontologies composed of entities, relationships, properties, and actions. You will then implement and maintain the data pipelines and transformations that reliably populate and evolve those ontologies.
- This role is ideal for an engineer who enjoys ontology-first thinking, data product design, strong governance, and enabling both analytics and operational use cases from a shared semantic foundation.
Ontology Design & Semantic Data Modeling (Primary Focus):
- Design, implement, and maintain Palantir Foundry Ontologies, including entities, relationships, properties, actions, and permissions.
- Translate business processes and domain requirements into clear, reusable entity and relationship models.
- Ensure semantic consistency across datasets by enforcing standardized definitions, naming conventions, and relationship patterns.
- Evolve ontologies over time while maintaining lineage, backward compatibility, and data contracts.
Build & Operate Foundry Pipelines Supporting the Ontology
- Design and implement ingestion pipelines into Foundry from APIs, relational databases, object storage, file drops, and external partners.
- Build transformation logic that materializes ontological entities and relationships from raw and curated data sources.
- Implement incremental processing and CDC patterns to keep ontology-backed data current.
- Optimize pipeline performance and reliability while maintaining clarity between raw, curated, and ontology-backed layers.
Deliver Ontology-Backed Analytics & Case Management Data Products
- Produce analysis-ready datasets that power case views, entity timelines, dashboards, cohort analysis, and trend reporting.
- Enable self-service analytics by ensuring ontology-backed datasets are intuitive, well-documented, and reusable.
- Support both human workflows (case review, operations) and analytical/ML consumption from the same semantic foundation.
Governance, Lineage & Data Quality
- Ensure datasets and entities are fully documented with ownership, descriptions, and business definitions.
- Maintain end-to-end lineage from source systems through transformations into ontological entities.
- Implement policy-based access controls and secure handling aligned to organizational and compliance requirements.
- Operationalize data quality checks (freshness, completeness, validity) tied to mission-critical entities.
Reliability, Performance & Operational Excellence
- Monitor pipelines and ontology-backed datasets using metrics, logs, and alerts.
- Troubleshoot failures, conduct root-cause analysis, and implement preventive improvements.
- Support environment promotion practices (DEV / TEST / PRE-PROD / PROD) with repeatable and auditable processes.
Cross-Team Collaboration
- Partner with platform engineering, security, analytics, and application teams to align ontology design with operational needs.
- Communicate complex ontology and data concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
- Participate in design and architecture reviews related to ontology evolution and data modeling standards.
What You Will Need:
- A Bachelor's degree is required
- A minimum of 8 years of experience building and operating production data pipelines and data models is required
- Hands-on experience with Palantir Foundry, or strong data engineering experience with the ability to ramp quickly.
- Palantir Foundry Ontology experience, including:
- Entity and relationship modeling
- Ontology-backed actions and workflows
- Permissioning and governance within the ontology
- Strong proficiency in SQL and at least one data engineering language (Python preferred; Scala/Java acceptable).
- Experience implementing ETL/ELT pipelines, incremental processing, and transformation best practices.
- Familiarity with governance fundamentals, including metadata, lineage, access controls, and data quality.
- Strong communication skills and experience working directly with product and mission stakeholders.
What Would Be Nice To Have:
- Palantir Application Developer experience, building operational applications and workflows on top of the ontology.
- Bachelor's degree in Engineering, Computer Science, Information Systems, or a related field (or equivalent practical experience).
- Palantir AIP experience, including:
- Ontology-backed document understanding and summarization
- Entity extraction and enrichment
- Human-in-the-loop review with governance controls
- Generative AI-assisted coding experience, such as:
- Using AI copilots for pipeline development, transformations, ontology evolution, and code review
- Applying generative AI to improve developer productivity while maintaining data quality and governance
- Experience supporting ontology-first designs for case management systems.
- Knowledge of entity resolution, relationship extraction, and graph-based modeling.
- Familiarity with Databricks, Spark, or Lakehouse architectures in hybrid environments.
- Exposure to CI/CD practices for data pipelines and ontology changes.