Foundry Engineering Lead

A rapidly growing technology organization is looking for a Foundry Engineering Lead to serve as the technical authority for its Palantir Foundry environment and lead a growing data engineering organization. This person will manage a team of 12–17 Data Engineers, setting the technical direction, engineering standards, processes and roadmap while continuing to provide strong technical oversight across the Foundry platform. We are open to candidates at Senior Director or VP level who have progressed from hands-on engineering into senior leadership.

You do not need to be coding every day, but you must retain a deep understanding of modern data platforms, Foundry architecture and the technologies your team is working with.

Responsibilities: Lead, mentor and develop a 12–17 person Data Engineering team, including hiring, team structure, processes and performance. Own the technical direction and architecture of the organization’s Palantir Foundry environment. Set engineering standards, best practices and technical roadmap across the team. Provide technical oversight across Ontology modelling, Pipeline Builder, data architecture and production data pipelines. Ensure the Foundry platform delivers scalable, reliable and governed data products.

Oversee data quality, lineage, monitoring, alerting, freshness and platform reliability. Guide the integration of Foundry with internal systems and external data sources. Establish strong development practices around Git, code reviews and CI/CD. Partner with senior leadership and business stakeholders to translate requirements into scalable technical solutions. Drive capacity planning, platform optimisation, reliability and cost efficiency. Act as the senior technical escalation point for complex Foundry and data engineering challenges.

Build a strong engineering culture while developing the next generation of technical leaders within the team.

Required Experience: Significant experience leading data engineering or software engineering teams, ideally at Director, Senior Director, VP or equivalent level. Proven experience managing teams of 10+ engineers and building or structuring engineering organisations. Deep professional experience with Palantir Foundry, including hands-on experience earlier in your career. Strong understanding of Foundry Ontology, Pipeline Builder, data architecture and production data pipelines.

Strong technical foundation in Python and Spark/PySpark, with experience across modern data platforms. Experience with APIs, including REST, GraphQL or Foundry APIs. Strong understanding of Git, CI/CD and modern software engineering practices. Ability to challenge technical decisions, understand architecture and guide engineers without needing to be the primary hands-on developer. Excellent communication skills with the ability to work with both technical teams and executive stakeholders.

Nice to Have: Experience with AWS, GCP or Azure. Experience with distributed systems, infrastructure telemetry or monitoring platforms. Experience working with usage, capacity, billing or operational datasets. Experience building customer-facing data products. Palantir certifications or extensive Foundry implementation experience.