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Nscale

Foundry Engineering Lead

Nscale is hiring a Foundry Engineering Lead in Houston, New York and San Francisco, United States. Level rates it ; you can apply on Nscale.

Level's read on this job

  • On Level's scale, this role is Works on AI ●●●○: the daily work is on AI products, without building the model.
  • Tools and skills the posting cites include Palantir Foundry, data architecture and data pipelines.
  • Level classifies it as a lead role.
  • Level lists 296 other open roles at Nscale.

AI in this role

Lead the technical design, development, and governance of Palantir Foundry data platform implementations to support operational workflows.

Palantir Foundry
data-architecturedata-pipelinesdata-modellingdata-governance

About the Role (Job Purpose)

We're looking for a Foundry Engineering Lead to serve as the technical authority for our Foundry implementation at Nscale—leading the design, development, and governance of the data platform that underpins our internal operations, workflows, and customer-facing capabilities.

This is a senior, high-impact role at the intersection of hands-on engineering and technical leadership. You'll set the architectural direction for Foundry, build and maintain the core data infrastructure, and work closely with Operations, Infrastructure, Platform Engineering, Product, and Commercial teams to deliver reliable, scalable data products.

As the most experienced Foundry engineer in the team, you'll mentor and guide other engineers and analysts, establish standards and best practices, and drive the technical roadmap as the platform scales.

This role is ideal for someone who combines deep, hands-on Foundry expertise with the confidence to lead technically—someone who can architect at scale, get into the details when it matters, and bring others along with them.

What You'll be Doing (Responsibilities)

  • Lead the design and architecture of Nscale's Foundry implementation, ensuring scalability, security, and long-term data integrity.

  • Define the technical strategy for Foundry development, aligning with business objectives and the programme-wide data roadmap.

  • Act as the technical authority on Foundry across the organisation—setting standards, driving architectural decisions, and owning the evolution of the platform.

  • Conduct code reviews and ensure adherence to best practices in data modelling, pipeline development, and integration.

  • Mentor engineers and analysts working within the Foundry environment, raising technical capability and quality across the team.

  • Design and build scalable, reliable data pipelines that ingest data from infrastructure, platform services, and business systems.

  • Define data models, schemas, and ontology structures that support operational workflows and use cases across the business.

  • Clean, transform, and structure data to create a digital twin of Nscale.

  • Implement permissioning and manage access and security of the Foundry implementation.

  • Create trusted datasets and metrics that power workflows, internal tools, and customer-facing insights.

  • Enable self-service analytics by establishing clear data contracts, documentation, and semantic layers.

  • Build use cases including, but not limited to:

    • Capacity planning

    • Cost optimisation

    • Reliability analysis

    • Customer reporting

  • Collaborate with Product and Commercial teams to translate real-world business questions into robust data solutions.

  • Implement data quality checks, monitoring, and alerting to ensure data correctness and availability.

  • Codify data lineage, freshness, and consistency across systems.

  • Establish and enforce governance standards around data versioning, access control, and compliance appropriate for a fast-scaling company.

  • Oversee the integration of Foundry with existing systems and data sources, ensuring seamless data flows.

Profile and Required Skills

  • Deep, hands-on expertise in Palantir Foundry, including ontology modelling, pipeline development, data architecture, and large-scale platform design.

  • Proven experience providing technical leadership—setting architectural direction, mentoring engineers, and defining standards in a data engineering context.

  • Strong proficiency in Python, with experience applying data engineering frameworks (e.g. Spark, PySpark, Dask, pandas) to large, complex datasets.

  • Familiarity with API-driven data integration, including REST, GraphQL, and Foundry Action APIs.

  • Experience with Git-based development workflows, including code reviews, version control, and CI/CD pipelines.

  • Excellent communication skills—able to explain complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.

  • Comfortable operating in ambiguous, fast-moving environments where requirements evolve quickly.

  • A bias toward ownership, pragmatism, and delivering useful solutions.

Nice to Have

  • Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) and infrastructure telemetry.

  • Familiarity with distributed systems, monitoring data, or usage-based billing data.

  • Experience supporting customer-facing data products or platforms.

For information on how Nscale handles candidate personal data, please see our Employee & Candidate Privacy Notice: Here.

Nscale does not accept unsolicited candidate submissions from recruitment agencies.

How we rate this

Foundry Engineering Lead at Nscale rates 65 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Works on AI (AI Level 3 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.

Classification

Works on AI. The daily work is on AI products, without building the model.

  1. ●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
  2. ●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
  3. ●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
  4. ●○○○ Little AI0 to 39

Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.

Prepare for this job

Built from this posting and from similar jobs on Level.

Skills and AI tools this role asks for

Data ArchitectureData PipelinesData ModellingData GovernancePalantir Foundry

Questions you could be asked

  1. Tell me about a project where data architecture was part of your work. What did you do?
  2. Tell me about a project where data pipelines was part of your work. What did you do?
  3. Tell me about a project where data modelling was part of your work. What did you do?
  4. Tell me about a project where data governance was part of your work. What did you do?
  5. Walk me through how you've used Palantir Foundry in your day-to-day work.

Adapt your resume

  • List these exact terms on your resume: Data Architecture, Data Pipelines, Data Modelling, Data Governance, and Palantir Foundry. An applicant tracking system matches the wording, not the idea.
  • Attach one line of real, concrete experience to at least one of them. A tool named with nothing behind it rarely survives a human read.
  • Show where AI is part of your daily process, not a one-off project. This role expects it to be a running habit.

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