Senior Palantir Ontology Architect

Location: New York, NY / Washington, DC / Hybrid
Company: The Carlyle Group

Overview

The Carlyle Group is seeking a highly experienced Senior Palantir Ontology Architect to lead the design, implementation, and enterprise-scale adoption of Palantir Foundry Ontology across complex investment, operational, and portfolio management environments.

This is a high-impact role for someone who combines deep technical mastery of the Palantir ecosystem with strong business acumen and execution capability. The ideal candidate has architected Ontology solutions at scale, understands how to operationalize enterprise data into decision-making workflows, and can work directly with senior stakeholders to drive transformation initiatives from concept through production.

You will play a foundational role in defining how enterprise data, operational workflows, AI applications, and business processes are modeled and activated across the organization.

Key Responsibilities

Enterprise Ontology Architecture

• Lead the architecture and evolution of large-scale Palantir Ontologies supporting enterprise-wide operational and investment workflows.
• Design scalable object models, action frameworks, event structures, and semantic layers aligned to business operations and decision-making processes.
• Define best practices for Ontology governance, modularity, versioning, lineage, and long-term maintainability.
• Establish standards for enterprise Ontology patterns across multiple business domains and use cases.

Platform Engineering & Execution

• Build and operationalize robust Foundry solutions leveraging:
  • Ontology Manager
  • Pipeline Builder
  • Code Repositories
  • Workshop
  • Operational Applications
  • AIP capabilities
• Architect scalable data pipelines and transformation frameworks using Python, PySpark, and SQL.
• Drive performance optimization across large distributed datasets and enterprise workloads.
• Lead implementation efforts from discovery and whiteboarding through deployment and production support.

Business-Focused Solution Delivery

• Partner directly with investment teams, operations, technology leadership, and portfolio company stakeholders to translate complex business processes into operational software and Ontology-driven applications.
• Build operational workflows that improve visibility, automation, governance, and decision intelligence.
• Create data products and applications that support investment operations, portfolio analytics, risk management, finance, compliance, and enterprise reporting.

AI & Operational Decisioning

• Design Ontology structures that enable scalable AI-driven workflows and operational automation.
• Partner with stakeholders to embed AIP logic, operational agents, and decision support capabilities into enterprise processes.
• Ensure Ontology design supports future extensibility for AI-enabled operations and enterprise copilots.

Leadership & Strategy

• Serve as a senior technical leader and trusted advisor across the Palantir ecosystem.
• Mentor engineers and solution teams on enterprise Ontology architecture and Foundry best practices.
• Contribute to long-term platform strategy, technical roadmaps, and enterprise data architecture standards.
• Drive a culture of ownership, execution, and operational excellence.

Required Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience in data engineering, platform engineering, or enterprise data architecture roles.
• Deep hands-on expertise with the Palantir Foundry platform in production enterprise environments.
• Demonstrated experience architecting and scaling complex Palantir Ontologies across large organizations.
• Strong understanding of:
  • Object modeling
  • Action frameworks
  • Event-driven architectures
  • Operational workflows
  • Semantic data layers
  • Enterprise data governance
• Advanced proficiency in Python, PySpark, and SQL.
• Experience building scalable distributed data systems and optimizing Spark workloads.
• Proven ability to operate in highly ambiguous, execution-oriented environments.
• Strong stakeholder engagement skills with the ability to communicate effectively across both technical and business audiences.
• Experience delivering operational software, not just analytics or dashboards.

Preferred Qualifications

• Previous experience working in private equity, asset management, financial services, or enterprise operations environments.
• Experience functioning in a Forward Deployed Engineer-style capacity with strong client-facing and execution-focused delivery capabilities.
• Exposure to enterprise AI implementations using Palantir AIP.
• Experience designing operational applications and workflow tooling within Foundry.
• Background in enterprise transformation, operational modernization, or strategic platform initiatives.
• Familiarity with Databricks, Snowflake, cloud-native architectures, and broader modern data ecosystems.

What Success Looks Like

• Enterprise Ontology models become foundational operational infrastructure across the organization.
• Business teams actively operate through Ontology-driven workflows and applications.
• AI-enabled operational processes are successfully embedded into day-to-day execution.
• Foundry adoption scales effectively across investment and operational functions.
• Data products are trusted, performant, maintainable, and deeply integrated into business decision-making.

Candidate Profile

This role is ideal for someone who:

• Thinks like an architect but executes like a builder.
• Can move between executive discussions and hands-on implementation seamlessly.
• Understands that Ontology is not simply data modeling, but operational software design.
• Has built enterprise-grade Foundry ecosystems that support real business operations at scale.
• Brings a highly ownership-oriented, Forward Deployed mindset with strong commercial awareness.