Palantir Data Engineer

Benefits

• Medical, Rx, Dental & Vision Insurance
• Personal and Family Sick Time & Company Paid Holidays
• Discretionary variable incentive bonus eligibility
• Parental Leave and Adoption Assistance
• 401(k) Retirement Plan
• Basic Life & Supplemental Life
• Health Savings Account, Dental/Vision & Dependent Care Flexible Spending Accounts
• Short-Term & Long-Term Disability
• Student Loan PayDown
• Tuition Reimbursement, Personal Development & Learning Opportunities
• Skills Development & Certifications
• Employee Referral Program
• Corporate Sponsored Events & Community Outreach
• Emergency Back-Up Childcare Program
• Mobility Stipend

Details

• Location: Washington, DC onsite
• Salary: $113,000 - $188,000 per year
• Travel: Up to 25%
• Clearance: Ability to Obtain Public Trust
• Education: Bachelor's degree required
• Experience: At least 3 years building and operating production data pipelines and data models

Responsibilities

• Create and manage ontologies within Palantir Foundry, defining entities, relationships, attributes, actions, and access controls
• Translate business processes into clear, reusable entity and relationship models
• Maintain semantic consistency across datasets by standardizing definitions and naming conventions
• Evolve ontologies while preserving lineage, backward compatibility, and data contracts
• Build ingestion pipelines into Foundry from APIs, relational databases, object storage, file drops, and external partners
• Develop transformation logic that materializes ontological entities and relationships from raw and curated data
• Implement incremental processing and CDC patterns to keep ontology-backed data current
• Optimize pipeline performance and reliability, keeping raw, curated, and ontology-backed layers distinct
• Produce analysis-ready datasets powering case views, entity timelines, dashboards, cohorts, and trend reporting
• Support self-service analytics by ensuring ontology-backed datasets are intuitive, well-documented, and reusable
• Support both human workflows and analytical or ML use from the same semantic foundation
• Document datasets and entities with owners, descriptions, and business definitions
• Maintain end-to-end lineage from source systems through transformations into ontological entities
• Enforce policy-based access controls and secure handling aligned with compliance requirements
• Operationalize data quality checks for freshness, completeness, and validity tied to critical entities
• Monitor pipelines and ontology-backed datasets using metrics, logs, and alerts
• Troubleshoot failures, perform root-cause analysis, and implement preventive improvements
• Support DEV, TEST, PRE-PROD, and PROD environment promotion with repeatable, auditable processes
• Collaborate with platform engineering, security, analytics, and application teams to align ontology design with operational needs
• Communicate complex ontology and data concepts clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders
• Participate in design and architecture reviews related to ontology evolution and data modeling standards

Technologies

• Palantir Foundry
• Palantir Foundry Ontology
• SQL
• Python
• Scala
• Java
• Databricks
• Spark

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree required
• Minimum of 3 years building and operating production data pipelines and data models
• Hands-on experience with Palantir Foundry, or strong data engineering background with the ability to ramp quickly
• Palantir Foundry Ontology experience, including entity and relationship modeling
• Palantir Foundry Ontology experience, including ontology backed actions and workflows
• Palantir Foundry Ontology experience, including 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

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 related field, or equivalent practical experience
• Palantir AIP experience, including ontology-backed document understanding and enrichment, entity extraction, and governance controls
• Generative AI assisted coding experience, such as AI copilots for pipeline development and ontology evolution
• 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