Senior Palantir Foundry Ontology Engineer

We are seeking a Senior Palantir Foundry Ontology Engineer for a client of ours who is in the Oil & Gas Sector, to serve as the organizational authority on ontology design, modeling, and management within the Palantir Foundry platform.

This position has a hybrid work mode with on-site 3-days per week, at their office in Downtown- Houston, TX.

This individual will lead the strategic development and ongoing evolution of the enterprise Foundry Ontology, ensuring object types, link types, and actions are modeled correctly, consistently, and in alignment with business processes.

The ideal candidate brings deep ontology expertise combined with strong data governance experience to ensure the ontology layer is scalable, well-governed, and drives reliable downstream applications., Ontology Design and Architecture

• Lead the design, implementation, and continuous refinement of the enterprise ontology within Palantir Foundry, including object types, properties, link types, and composite object structures.
• Define and enforce ontology modeling standards, naming conventions, and documentation requirements across all Foundry projects.
• Architect ontology structures that accurately represent business domains while optimizing performance in downstream applications such as Workshop and AIP Analyst.Evaluate trade-offs between ontology modeling approaches (e.g., flattened vs. normalized object hierarchies, use of interface object types) and guide teams toward consistent, scalable patterns.
• Own the ontology versioning and change management process, including impact analysis for proposed schema changes across dependent applications.

Ontology-Driven Application Enablement

• Partner with application developers to ensure Workshop modules, Object Explorer views, AIP functions, and operational dashboards are built on a well-structured ontology foundation.
• Design ontology-backed workflows that translate complex business processes into intuitive Foundry application experiences.
• Establish patterns for ontology-powered alerting, notifications, and automated decision support.

Governance and Stewardship

• Develop and maintain governance policies for ontology lifecycle management, including creation, modification, deprecation, and retirement of object and link types.
• Implement and enforce access controls at the ontology layer using Foundry Organizations, Markings, and object-level permissions to ensure least-privilege access.
• Establish dataset-to-ontology lineage standards so that every object type has clear, documented backing datasets with defined ownership and stewardship.
• Lead periodic ontology health reviews to identify unused or redundant object types, broken linkages, stale backing datasets, and permission misconfigurations.
• Chair or participate in an Ontology Governance Council to review proposed changes, adjudicate conflicts, and align cross-functional stakeholders.

Data Quality and Pipeline Integration

• Collaborate with data engineering teams to ensure backing datasets feeding the ontology meet defined quality thresholds before syncing to the object layer.
• Establish ontology-level data quality checks and expectations, including property completeness, referential integrity across link types, and freshness monitoring.
• Guide teams on proper use of ontology sync configurations, incremental pipelines, and indexing strategies to maintain performance at scale.

Security and Compliance

• Work with Information Security to ensure ontology modeling and access controls meet regulatory requirements (e.g., SOX or agency-specific mandates).
• Conduct periodic audits of ontology permissions, action logs, and object-level access patterns; remediate findings and report to leadership.

Do you have experience in Ontology?, * 7+ years of experience in data engineering, data modeling, or platform architecture.

• At least 3 years of hands-on Palantir Foundry experience focused on the Ontology layer.
• Demonstrated expertise in Foundry ontology constructs, including object types, link types, Actions, interfaces, ontology sync configurations, and the Ontology SDK.Strong proficiency in Foundry transforms (PySpark, SQL) and the data connection framework, with a clear understanding of how backing datasets flow into the ontology.
• Proven track record of designing enterprise-scale ontologies that support multiple downstream applications (e.g., Workshop, AIP Analyst).Experience with ontology-level permissions including Organizations, Markings, restricted properties, and object-level security.
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to translate complex ontology modeling decisions into clear business rationale for stakeholders and leadership., * Data Engineering, Data Modeling, or Platform Architecture.: 7 years (Preferred)
• Palantir Foundry experience focused on the Ontology layer.: 3 years (Preferred)

Work Location: Hybrid remote in Houston, TX 77002