Platform Engineering and Operations Lead (Palantir)

Acosta•Lewisville, TX

About The Position

The Platform Engineering and Operations Lead is the hands-on internal technical owner of Acosta Group’s enterprise Palantir Foundry and Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP) ecosystem within the AI Center of Excellence. The role engineers and operates a secure, reliable, governed, reusable, and cost-effective platform while supporting product, program, and project teams from solution design and build through deployment, go-live, stabilization, and ongoing production support. The role owns platform administration, DevSecOps, identity and access management, observability, enterprise integration, ontology governance, and FinOps. It provides technical direction to vendor engineers, establishes engineering standards and priorities, reviews deliverables, manages escalations, and retains critical platform knowledge and decision-making within the enterprise.

Requirements

10+ years of progressive experience in software, data, platform, or cloud engineering; DevSecOps; site reliability engineering (SRE); enterprise integration; or related technical domains.
5+ years building or operating enterprise data, analytics, AI, developer, or cloud platforms in production.
Hands-on Foundry platform engineering or administration and AIP solution delivery or operations experience, including production support—not solely application development, architecture advisory, or vendor contract management.
Experience supporting multiple delivery teams through build, deployment, go-live, stabilization, and ongoing operations in environments requiring security, reliability, governance, auditability, and cost management.
Experience technically leading vendor engineers, managed-service teams, consultants, or distributed engineering resources.
Deep technical capability in Foundry administration, AIP enablement, ontology design and governance, data pipelines, applications, actions, and integrations.
Proficiency in DevSecOps, CI/CD, release controls, environment promotion, IAM/RBAC, least-privilege design, and enterprise security practices.
Strong troubleshooting and production engineering skills, including observability, SLAs/SLOs, incident response, resilience, disaster recovery, and operational readiness.
Understanding of APIs, enterprise integration, data movement, cloud services, and cross-platform ownership and support.
Ability to connect platform consumption and solution design to allocation, forecasting, optimization, and cost-to-serve.
Hands-on technical leadership, sound prioritization, and the ability to direct vendor teams while balancing delivery, reliability, security, governance, and cost.
Strong stakeholder partnership and written and verbal communication skills; ability to translate technical risks and investment needs into business decisions, clear documentation, and executive-ready updates.
Adaptability in an evolving, multi-team environment.

Nice To Haves

Experience with shared enterprise Palantir environments, Palantir partner organizations, major cloud/identity/data integrations, and reusable platform services is advantageous.

Responsibilities

Own Foundry and AIP administration, configuration, environment strategy, releases, upgrades, capacity, and operational health; engineer shared services, automation, and reusable patterns for AIP applications, agents, workflows, and model/tool integration.
Partner with delivery teams on architecture, hands-on build, integration, testing, deployment, go-live readiness, and stabilization; coordinate environments, access, release windows, cutover, and post-production support ownership.
Establish monitoring, alerting, service levels, runbooks, incident response, problem management, and escalation paths; lead complex incidents, root-cause analysis, service restoration, and continuous improvement; define and test recovery and continuity practices.
Establish repeatable development, testing, promotion, and deployment practices for code, configuration, data products, ontology changes, and AIP capabilities; implement quality gates, traceability, segregation of duties, rollback plans, and production-readiness controls.
Own identity and access management and role-based access control, including least privilege, privileged access, approvals, periodic reviews, and auditable permissions; partner with Cyber and enterprise teams on vulnerability management, policy compliance, and control remediation.
Define ontology design standards, stewardship, lifecycle management, documentation, and controlled change for shared objects, relationships, actions, interfaces, and business concepts; promote reuse and assess downstream impacts, lineage, data quality, security, testing, and versioning.
Establish secure, resilient, observable integrations across enterprise applications, APIs, data platforms, identity services, analytics tools, and cloud services; partner with data engineering on pipeline reliability, orchestration, performance, and cross-platform issue resolution.
Establish consumption and cost visibility, allocation, forecasting, budgeting inputs, and optimization reviews where data is available; translate cost drivers into architecture, processing, scheduling, retention, and configuration improvements; support vendor/SOW and renewal decisions.
Set vendor engineering priorities, capacity, service expectations, quality standards, and escalation procedures; review designs, code, configuration, operational changes, and incident analysis; ensure knowledge transfer, documentation, coverage, and internal technical ownership.
Create onboarding guidance, reference implementations, templates, and engineering playbooks; partner with Palantir, product teams, Cyber, Infrastructure, Data Governance, Finance, and business stakeholders to balance delivery speed, reliability, reuse, governance, and cost.