Palantir Interview Process

A walkthrough of every step of the Palantir interview process for the Forward Deployed Engineer role, with the resources I used to prepare for each one.

Jun 15 2022
1984 words · 11 minutes
career No categories assigned

Introduction

After long and grueling years as a student, it was finally time for me to set foot on the real world and start a full-time job. Well, I am now 3 months into my first role as a Forward Deployed Engineer at Palantir and very happy so far. I had to go through a lengthy and educative interview process to land this role. Since, as you already know, I love sharing my learnings, I decided to write about this experience. In this post, on top of explaining each interview, I will also link to resources that I recommend in order to exceed in that specific interview step.

I see this work as the last and biggest of my series of posts about interviewing, my personal Opus Magnum one could say, and me finishing this chapter. I might still write about interviewing and the whole process around it from time to time but I decided to change my focus to other things. What things that might be, I don’t know yet. I want to keep writing, of course, more frequently actually, just not about interviewing there is already a lot of good content about that regardless.

Anyways, let’s get to the real meat and talk about my personal experience interviewing for Palantir.

Initial Contact

My initial contact with Palantir was over Linkedin, the recruiter contacted me and set up a phone call. In the call they briefly asked about my past experiences and asked one or two behavioral questions, this call seemed more to be about making sure that I was a general fit and less about filtering out candidates. At the end of the call the recruiter already set up the next interview, this one was about two weeks later.

The first real interview

The interviews that followed were all over video call. The first of those was the only one that resembles typical Leetcode-style interviews one might already know from Big Tech companies.

The first half of this interview was focused on behavioral questions, here I talked about some of my past job experiences and the challenges I had to overcome there. For these kinds of questions, I recommend using the STAR↗ method to narrate one’s answers. The method is rather simple but forces you to structure your thoughts and will lead to a more impressive story in the end.

It was very helpful that I already had past job experience through internships, so I was able to confidently answer the behavioral parts of all my interviews. But even if you don’t have this kind of experience it’s good enough to talk about your university projects or personal projects.

In the second half of the interview, I had to solve a typical Leetcode-style challenge. I won’t get into details about the specific question but my prior preparation via Leetcode helped immensely. Additionally, I had some notes when doing a mock interview with an Amazon Bar raiser that prepared me for this kind of technical interview. You can find the notes here↗ and reading Cracking the Coding Interview↗ might help you as well.

After the technical part of the interview, there were a few minutes left in which I could ask the interviewer questions. This is my favorite part of the interview process, as it allows me to get a better feel for the company culture and to also ask some not-so-easy questions. This↗ Hackernews thread has questions that I found interesting, feel free to pick any from there or just ask anything that’s on your mind. Be sure to use this opportunity to get some valuable data points about the company and not let it go to waste.

A few days after the interview I got a message from my recruiter, I passed. It was time to schedule the next round, this time the onsite interview.

Onsite Interview

The onsite consisted of three separate rounds that were 1 hour long each. Each interview started with a behavioral part, we chatted a bit, and the interviewers again asked me about past experiences, past challenges I had to overcome, situations that I am weak in, etc. This time the interviewers were more specific in their questions and asked me about my motivation behind wanting to work for Palantir and how I fit the role of the Forward Deployed Engineer. It is very important to have a deep understanding of the company’s mission as well as the role you are applying for. I’ll quickly summarize those two for Palantir’s case.

The role of a Forward Deployed Engineer

The role of an FDE is a role specific to Palantir, so I didn’t know about it before applying. An FDE is a Software Engineer that is working directly with the customer for the deployment of the Palantir product. Therefore they will be responsible for solving all the technical problems that might arise in that deployment. Typical tasks can be related to data integrations (Palantir works a lot with Spark and other distributed data technologies), making sure the software stack is up to date and fixing outages if any arise. Additionally, an FDE is in close contact with both the Customer as well as the Product Development Teams to ensure a quick feedback loop for the customer and continuous improvement of the product. It’s not rare for FDEs to introduce changes to the Product themselves via Pull Request.

Ultimately Palantir is a company with a very low level of bureaucracy and hierarchies, which means that you are expected to shape your career and move to tasks and responsibilities that you see yourself thrive in. Therefore the responsibilities of FDEs can range widely between each person, some are very technical and later move to roles like Software Engineer or Site Reliability Engineer, while others are very focused on communication with the customer and do work that is more akin to Palantir’s Deployment Strategist↗.

Palantir’s Mission

To understand the mission as well as the culture of Palantir I recommend watching some interviews with the CEO Alex Karp. This↗ is an interview I personally enjoyed and that gave me a good insight into Palantir’s culture.

In short Palantir’s mission is to help organizations get insights into their data to enable them to solve hard and important problems. Palantir’s technology is built to help institutions protect civil liberties, this means that it is designed with Data Protection in mind. In my interview specifically, I mentioned my past voluntary work, which I think left a positive impression on the interviewer. While I believe voluntary work is a good way in making the world better, organizations like Palantir do this on a much bigger scale by for example enabling vaccine distribution for entire countries or helping Ukrainian refugees find shelter in the UK.

The second half of each onsite interview was technical. The first onsite interview was about Systems Design, in this kind of interview you are expected to design a scalable application that solves a specific business problem. It’s up to you (or the interviewer) how deep you go in designing each specific component. Typically these kinds of interviews don’t involve any coding, and if they do just some quick pseudo code or SQL queries.

This book↗ is generally cited as a good source for Systems Design interviews. I did not read it myself but it’s currently on my reading list. I was able to pass my Systems Design Interview process without any specific preparation but instead fell back on the knowledge I gathered from my University studies and prior work experience.

The second and third interviews however involved coding. They deviated from Leetcode in the sense that there was an already existing code base and I had to introduce changes to it. I was given a specific business-related problem to solve and API documentation for the code base I was working on. These interviews felt close to a real working environment as I was trying to understand an external API while figuring out how to use it to solve the problem at hand. This a situation most of you probably know from coding yourself. I liked these interviews much more than traditional Leetcode interviews because I felt much more connected to the problem and did not feel like I was just solving some brain teasers to impress my interviewer.

The onsite was in total only 3 hours but felt intense! After a week I was given positive feedback and was told the next round would be the final round.

Hiring Manager

The last interview was with the hiring manager. My final interview came with somewhat of a delay, as I was on vacation during that time.

Before the interview, my recruiter called me and explained to me what the expectations of this interview are. Something I appreciated from my recruiter and that helped me tackle the final interview!

My recruiter gave me a hint that the Hiring Manager wanted to see how aligned I was with Palantir’s mission as well as the role of the Forward deployed Engineer. They told me not to simply read from the company’s website but instead do some real reflection and come to some honest conclusions. And that’s what I did. I watched multiple Karp interviews, took some notes, and in the end created a page in my notebook with all the reasons why I was a good fit for the role and the company.

This experience with my recruiter was extremely positive. In general keep in mind that the recruiter is on your side. They want you to succeed and will give you any help necessary for you to succeed.

The interview went very well, the hiring manager was likable, and we chatted about all sorts of things throughout the scheduled hour. As expected the interviewer asked me about my motivation to work for Palantir and the role of an FDE. As I was adequately prepared I was able to answer the questions quite well, and I think I left a good impression on them!

In my impression, the purpose of the Hiring Manager interview at Palantir is to collect additional data points about the weaknesses they saw in previous rounds.

The offer and negotiation

After a week I finally had the call with the interviewer and was beyond nervous. As the recruiter called we started with some chitchat and I could not shake off my nervousness. After the initial chitchat, I finally got the positive message and actually got the offer. The recruiter furthermore gave me additional details about the offer. The benefits were pretty normal, additionally, some RSU was offered. What was quite shocking was the Total Compensation, for my location (Munich) the compensation offered for a new grad was something unheard of. For Americans, it might be considered a normal offer, but for my location, it was compensation some engineers only reach after many years of experience if even then.

Despite this generous offer, I decided to negotiate and a few days later answered with a counteroffer. I followed this guide↗ when negotiating. I was able to negotiate a Sign-On Bonus, effectively raising the first year’s Total Compensation by a considerable amount! My advice here is to always negotiate since once you have an offer you will almost never get it rescinded just for trying to negotiate. You have nothing to lose here but plenty to win. The worst that can happen is that your offer will not change at all which is the same outcome as if you did not negotiate in the first place.

Conclusion

All in all, I would say the interview experience at Palantir was great. It was by far the best interview experience I had so far, I can tell that the company invests a lot of resources to ensure a smooth experience for its interviewees. To pass this interview it’s important to be genuinely dedicated to the role description as well as the company’s mission.

List of resources

Thanks for reading!

Palantir Interview Process

Jun 15 2022
1984 words · 11 minutes
career No categories assigned

© Edin Citaku | CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

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