Management & enablementFoundry adoptionPhase 2: Develop infrastructure to unlock scalingRoles and responsibilities
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Phase 2: Roles and responsibilities

The following are new roles and responsibilities for Phase 2 of the Foundry Program team, in addition to the roles established in Phase 1.

Education & Training Expert

Responsibilities

  • Coordinate training events that are aligned with business and use case prioritization; working with Use Case Leads and Domain Leads to align training with usse case launches, feature launches, and the addition of new cohorts of users to a given workflow.
  • Work with use case teams to develop training documentation specific to use cases and workflows, with the goal of ensuring that users and developers alike can understand different use cases and workflows and that training and documentation around those use cases meets program standards.
  • Interface with company-specific internal HR processes to include Foundry in a company's education program, certification, and execution; the Education & Training Expert should work with HR to integrate Foundry training and education into onboarding and continuing education programs across all organization verticals. Doing so will prevent the Foundry Program from becoming siloed and not integrated with the rest of the organization.
  • Evangelize Foundry through education; own the communication and publicization of available trainings and existing use cases. This can take many shapes depending on the organization structure but can include working with your organization's Learning and Development team to include Foundry training in development and upskilling opportunities, or working with internal communications or events teams to announce new training and certification opportunities and communicating the benefits of Foundry education.
  • Conduct skills gap analyses and audits for continuous improvement of training and education resources; develop assessments of the success of different training and education materials based on business outcomes and ROI improvements.
  • Create Foundry training programs to mark milestones and success criteria for different roles and use cases; these can be workshops, online trainings, self-service trainings, Palantir-provided learning resources, live trainings, and quizzes and documentation, as well as designing training projects in Foundry.
  • If a "Train-the-Trainer" program exists within one's organization, this role should coordinate and facilitate the delivery of this program; this allows Foundry education to expand beyond the constraints of just the dedicated education and training resource.

Profile and required skills

  • Knowledge of instructional design best practices and training methods, including coaching, workshops, and e-learning methods
  • Excellent communication and collaboration skills
  • Strong organizational skills and previous experience in project management
  • Some technical domain knowledge
  • Understanding of the business's structures and teams, and ability to liaise across teams and deeply understand their goals

Relevant Foundry applications and resources

Data Governance Administrator

Responsibilities

  • Focus on making data usable by users, in compliance with internal and external data quality standards and SLAs.
  • Own the documentation and maintenance of data governance requirements at the Program, and communicate these across workstreams.
  • Build monitoring and metrics around data governance processes, and own the continuous reporting and adjustment of these systems.
  • Partner with Permissions Managers and the Data Lead to implement groups and roles in project permissions. Create documentation and repeatable workflows across common project types and workflows to enable self-service on data governance requirements as applied to each project type.
  • Implement data governance review processes across all workstreams within the Foundry Program. Work with team leads to understand their workstream's needs and processes, and implement data governance checks, requirements, and processes to ensure data governance standards are being met across the Program.
  • If needed, interface with Palantir teams for support services delivery; leverage Palantir's resources, including documentation, advisory teams, and support services, to implement a data governance program in alignment with the organization's needs and with adequate vendor support systems in place.

Within Phase 1, the Data Governance Administrator role can often be assumed by the Data Lead or the Ontology Lead. However, we recommend assigning this as a standalone role with dedicated resourcing by Phase 3 at the latest due to the scale of data management and complexity of workflows and use cases.

Profile and required skills

  • Familiarity with organization-wide data access permissions, regulations, and authentication systems (Okta and Active Directory, for example)
  • Programming skills (SQL, Python, PySpark/Spark)
  • Knowledge of data quality and version control best practices
  • Familiarity with agents / VMs
  • Strong technical communicator
  • Knowledge of systems architecture

Relevant Foundry applications and resources

Data Source Developer(s)

Responsibilities

  • Data source Developers are engineers who take on individual contributor tasks from the Data Lead and own the sourcing and cleaning process for all relevant data sources used across the Foundry Program.
  • We recommend assigning this role to a centralized team of Data Source Developers rather than decentralizing ownership among use case teams to maintain alignment with compliance, governance, and security requirements across all pipelines. Doing so also ensures standardization of data structures and pipeline architecture.
  • Each Data Source Developer owns the data connection configuration and technical connection to a set of data sources along with the Foundry data source Project, where the ingested data is made available in raw format.
  • As a team, Data Source Developers should own the creation of shared libraries and other documentation for data cleaning, cleaning automation, and data obfuscation when necessary.
  • Work with data owners in the organization to gather technical details about sources and to design pipelines that will implement data ingestion to best support organization goals and the end-state workflow's strategy and requirements.
  • Own daily management of data ingestion, pipeline health, and data quality. Ensure pipeline design, building, updating, and monitoring work is appropriately scheduled in alignment with Program goals and with use case and workflow requirements.
  • Manage and address failures or issues in data sources. This includes working with relevant IT teams and the Program Manager to create escalation SOPs, and monitoring and alerting systems for reactive response to failures, driving communications around failures, implementing remediation when failures arise, and creating retrospective processes to drive lessons learned from failures.
  • Focus on making data available to users, in compliance with internal and external data quality standards and SLAs. Work closely with Compliance teams and the Head of Data Governance to create guidelines, best practices, and review and monitoring processes for data pipelines.

Profile and required skills

  • Data Engineering skills (SQL, Python, PySpark/Spark)
  • Knowledge of data cleaning and quality best practices
  • Knowledge of version control best practices
  • Familiarity with agents / VMs / connecting systems

Relevant Foundry applications and resources

Ontology Manager(s)

Responsibilities

  • Own the development of the ontology from the existing model and production pipelines that then services as the consumption point for all workflow projects.
  • Manage the Ontology backlog, prioritizing change requests and triaging to other teams when required. Evaluate all requests for new objects and other changes to the Ontology with a clear view of the impact to the broader organizational Ontology and the evolution and roadmap of the Ontology in the long-term.
  • Partner with Use Case Leads and Data Source Developers on requests for new data sources to be ingested into Foundry; take a central role in all new use case architecture and data sourcing discussions to ensure alignment with the existing Ontology and with the Program-wide strategy for Ontology growth and evolution.
  • Own Ontology maintenance and develop a deep understanding of relevant data sources for each use case. Collaborate with Data Source Developers to understand data sources and become subject matter experts to plan integration into the ontology, and work with use case teams to understand the impact of Ontology design and decisions.
  • Work with Data Governance and Compliance teams to ensure access to the ontology and data sources are implemented in compliance with internal governance procedures. Develop scalable processes for governance checks in Ontology development and maintenances.
  • Work closely with the Ontology Lead and Data Lead to ensure alignment between the Ontology and data ingestion and maintenance processes. Develop the Ontology in alignment with the Program-wide roadmap and long-term strategy.

The Ontology Manager role is often centralized, but for a mature platform (Phases 3 and 4) this role can be segmented into individual domains. In Phase 4, this role will provide guidance and feature requests to Pipeline Developers and Object View Developers to ensure the Ontology and data asset can best support ad hoc usage and use case development.

Profile and required skills

  • Data pipeline development and management skills
  • Database knowledge
  • Organizational domain knowledge
  • Capability to communicate between technical and non-technical stakeholders

Relevant Foundry applications and resources