Foundry Engineering Lead in London

About Nscale

Nscale is the GPU cloud engineered for AI. We provide cost-effective, high-performance infrastructure for AI start-ups and large enterprise customers. Nscale enables AI-focused companies to achieve superior results by reducing the complexity of AI development. Our GPU cloud bolsters technical capabilities and directly supports strategic business outcomes, including cost management, rapid innovation, and environmental responsibility. We thrive on a culture of relentless innovation, ownership, and accountability, where every team member takes pride in their work and drives it with excellence and urgency. As an Nscaler, you'll build trust through openness and transparency, where everyone is inspired to do their best work. If you join our team, you'll be contributing to building the technology that powers the future.

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.

What We Can Offer You

At Nscale, you'll find a collaborative, supportive, and innovative environment where your contributions spark real impact. We're building something extraordinary, and we want you at the core.

• Highly competitive package (base + equity) with reviews every 12 months.
• Join the fastest-growing tech startup, your chance to push boundaries, collaborate with brilliant minds, and make your mark on cutting-edge AI.
• Expect a dynamic progression plan tailored to your ambitions. Grow by trying new things, leading, challenging the status quo, and owning your impact, always with our full support.
• Human-First Flexibility: We treat you as humans first. Our flexible workplace trusts Nscalers to deliver, giving you the autonomy to shape your day around life's moments.

Equal Opportunities Statement

We strongly encourage applications from people of colour, the LGBTQ+ community, people with disabilities, neurodivergent people, parents, carers, and people from lower socio-economic backgrounds. If there's anything we can do to accommodate your specific situation, please let us know. The responsibilities outlined in this job description are not exhaustive and are intended to provide a general overview of the position. The employee may be required to perform additional duties, tasks, and responsibilities as assigned by management, consistent with the skills and qualifications required for the role.