Palantir Data Engineer

This onsite role in McLean, VA offers a competitive compensation range of USD 113,000 to 188,000 per year, along with a comprehensive benefits package and strong pathways for professional growth. You will join Guidehouse as a Palantir Data Engineer focused on designing and operating ontology driven data products in Palantir Foundry. The work centers on semantic data modeling, governance, and analytics to support case management and operational workflows. The environment emphasizes collaboration across platform engineering, security, analytics, and application teams, with a clear commitment to data quality and governance.

Responsibilities

• Create, implement, and maintain Palantir Foundry Ontologies, defining entities, relationships, properties, actions, and permissions.
• Translate business processes and domain requirements into clear, reusable entity and relationship models.
• Maintain semantic consistency across datasets through standardized definitions, naming conventions, and relationship patterns.
• Evolve ontologies over time while preserving lineage, backward compatibility, and data contracts.
• Design 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 change data capture to keep ontology backed data current.
• Optimize pipeline performance and reliability while distinguishing raw, curated, and ontology backed layers.
• Produce analysis ready datasets that power case views, entity timelines, dashboards, cohort analyses, and trend reporting.
• Enable self service analytics by delivering intuitive, well documented ontology backed datasets.
• Support both human workflows and analytical or machine learning consumption from the same semantic foundation.
• Document datasets and entities with ownership, 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 to compliance requirements.
• Operationalize data quality checks for freshness, completeness, and validity tied to mission critical entities.
• Monitor pipelines and ontology backed datasets using metrics, logs, and alerts.
• Troubleshoot failures, perform root cause analysis, and implement preventive improvements.
• Support environment promotion practices (DEV, TEST, PRE-PROD, PROD) with repeatable and 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.

Requirements

• Bachelor's degree required.
• Minimum of 3 years of experience building and operating production data pipelines and data models.
• 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.
• Palantir Foundry Ontology experience, including ontology backed actions and workflows.
• Palantir Foundry Ontology experience, including permissioning and governance within the ontology.
• Strong SQL proficiency and experience with at least one data engineering language (Python preferred; Scala/Java acceptable).
• Experience implementing ETL or 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 collaborating directly with product and mission stakeholders.

Technologies

• Palantir Foundry
• Palantir Foundry Ontology
• SQL
• Python
• Scala
• Java
• Palantir AIP
• Databricks
• Spark
• Lakehouse architectures

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 Insurance
• Health Savings Account, Dental/Vision and 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

Nice to Have

• Palantir Application Developer experience building operational applications and workflows on 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 summarization
• Palantir AIP experience covering entity extraction and enrichment
• Palantir AIP experience with human-in-the-loop review and governance controls
• Experience using AI copilots for pipeline development, transformations, ontology evolution, and code review
• Applying generative AI to improve developer productivity while upholding 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