Palantir Technologies Interview Questions & Reviews
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Updated Feb 8, 2012 – Interview questions and reviews posted anonymously by interview candidates.
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Difficulty Rating [?] Based on 79 ratings 
“Difficult” Interview
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Interview Experience [?] Based on 79 ratings
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See who your friends know who've worked at Palantir Technologies and could give you an inside look.
See who your friends know who've worked at Palantir Technologies and could help you prep for an interview.
| 1–10 of 79 Palantir Technologies Interviews | Sort by |
Embedded Analyst at Palantir Technologies
Posted Feb 8, 2012
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3.0
Average Interview
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Overall Neutral Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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Interviewed Jan 2012 in New York, NY (took 2+ weeks)
First call went well, I had a great conversation. The second call did not go as well. The interviewer seemed distracted. The recruiter got the news, but no clear explanation for the denial. Good company, good people. Too bad I didn't get to talk with them in person.
Interview Questions
Other Details
I got the interview through a Recruiter and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview and a Skills Test.
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Business Development, Embedded Analyst at Palantir Technologies
Posted Jan 30, 2012
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4.0
Difficult Interview
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Overall Neutral Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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Interviewed Jan 2012 in Palo Alto, CA (took 3 months)
The first two rounds were fairly straightforward. Because bizdev folks are supposed to understand the Palantir platform, the first round was a timed test about their software and their proprietary programming language. The second round was a phone interview, where I was given various graphs and asked to analyze them based on some fairly well-known metrics (I have a finance background).
Passed both tests with flying colors, and made it to the in-person interview round, which I will describe in detail now. Basically, the moral of the story is to get some sleep before the interview, or you'll end up muffing basic math. Also, I spent a lot of time rehearsing brain teasers; in my experience, that was totally useless. No brain teasers were asked, just domain specific stuff (basic finance & very elementary CS knowledge).
- Interview 1: More graph interpretation using well-known financial metrics. The issue here is to not think about them in finance terms, but completely mathematically. If you have a finance background, do *not* jump to conclusions about what they are asking.
- Interview 2: Questions about their software and proprietary programming language; fairly easy. You don't need to be a programming whiz to understand how their software works.
- Interview 3: Basic algorithm questions, very similar to the ones on projecteuler.net. As some have mentioned, they focus on the length of time it takes the algorithm to run.
- Interview 4: Lunch with the team lead. Very laid-back, nothing technical.
- Interview 5: Discussion of some very well-known financial metrics (again, in completely mathematical terms). At one point, had to compare two customized metrics against each other and see if they were the same. This involved comparing two semi-complicated series of fractions.
I haven't heard back from Palantir yet, but I'm assuming I didn't get the job because I didn't meet any founders, and because I genuinely feel I flubbed the 5th interview (and the 1st to some extent). Basically, this was my first round of technical interviews ever, and by the time I got to #5, I just didn't feel like wrestling with fractions. Ugh!
On the other hand, I actually think that the interview style was fair and relevant. They didn't ask stupid brain teasers and all of the questions actually seemed germane to the job.
Interview Questions
Other Details
I got the interview through an Employee Referral and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview, a 1:1 Interview and an IQ/Intelligence Test.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
Software Development Intern at Palantir Technologies
Posted Jan 24, 2012 — 1 of 1 people found this helpful
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4.0
Difficult Interview
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Overall Neutral Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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Interviewed Oct 2011 in Palo Alto, CA (took 1 week)
Please be as detailed as possible - everything from your initial communications with the company, organization and planning of the interview, number and type of interviews, and any advice you might offer to other interview candidates. Bonus points for your perceptions of the people, office, and work culture.
Interview Questions
Other Details
I got the interview through a College or University and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview.
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Front End Software Engineer at Palantir Technologies
Posted Jan 26, 2012
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4.0
Difficult Interview
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Overall Neutral Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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Interviewed Jan 2012 (took 1 week)
I applied online, and received an email from a recruiter the next day and then scheduled a phone interview for the week after. The interviewer was very friendly, and professional. He gave me a high level overview of what the product, and then asked me some technical questions. The questions weren't hard but I got the impression that the expectation was quick perfect answers. So a word of advice if you're interviewing at this place is to be very confident about algorithms including running time, and memory space.
Interview Questions
Other Details
I Applied Online and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
Forward Deployed Engineer at Palantir Technologies
Posted Jan 21, 2012 — 0 of 1 people found this helpful
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4.0
Difficult Interview
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Overall Positive Experience
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Received and Accepted Offer
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Interviewed Jan 2012 in London, England (United Kingdom) (took 2 months)
Applied through an employee referral, exchanged a few e-mails with a recruiter and then organised a phone interview.
First phone interview consisted of some conversation about what I was doing at the moment, and then algorithms questions. Received a second phone interview which was similar, some casual discussion about different languages and why I liked them, then some coding/algorithms questions.
Was supposed to go for on-site interviews in London, but both team members had last minute emergencies to sort out, so these work reorganised to skype interviews, similar questions to the other phone interviews, but in a more conversational style.
Flown out to interviews in California, put up in a very nice hotel for a few night with everything paid for, despite only being interviewed on 1 day. Interviews all day with different team members with a presentation of the product in the middle, and was taken to lunch by one team member.
After lunch a quick chat with my recruiter making sure we had everything sorted and filling me in on some bits of the job that hadn't been covered yet, then 2 interviews with the founders.
Interview Questions
Other Details
I got the interview through an Employee Referral and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview, a 1:1 Interview and a Skills Test.
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Software Engineering at Palantir Technologies
Posted Jan 16, 2012
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3.0
Average Interview
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Overall Neutral Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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Interviewed Oct 2011 (took a day)
I applied for a summer intern position at the university career affair. A few days later, a HR contacted to schedule a phone interview. The interviewer is generally very friendly. He called on time. The interviewer start straight with technical questions. Most of the questions are about basic knowledge in computer science.
Interview Questions
Other Details
I got the interview through a College or University and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview.
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Software Engineer at Palantir Technologies
Posted Jan 10, 2012
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4.0
Difficult Interview
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Overall Negative Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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Interviewed Jan 2012 (took 2 days)
Palantir Technologies:
Recruiter called me up and described about the company i.e. how startup mode they are working, free food, benefits. I was not interested in knowing all these at the current step. I asked her about the job description in detail. She then happily arranged for a phone interview.
Now during phone interview, I was given Shared google document and started to analyze the problem statement and write the code. It was something to do with the implementation of Jquery. How would you do it and and write the sample code for it.
I was surprised that they directly went on to ask the question rather than giving me an insight into the job responsibilities and roles.
Interview Questions
Other Details
I got the interview through a Recruiter and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview.
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Helpful Interview?
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Software Engineer at Palantir Technologies
Posted Jan 9, 2012
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3.0
Average Interview
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Overall Positive Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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Interviewed Dec 2011 (took a day)
Very professional. Called exactly on time. No preliminaries, except a "How did you hear about Palantir". I had gone to their talk on the University campus and in addition to dropping of my resume, I applied through their website as well. From my experience, it sounds like they require people who are top of the line coders.
Interview Questions
Other Details
I Applied Online and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview.
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QA Engineer at Palantir Technologies
Posted Dec 28, 2011
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3.0
Average Interview
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Overall Positive Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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Interviewed Oct 2011 (took 1 week)
Interviewed first with an HR person who asked some pretty easy screening questions. Later on I was told that I had done fine and was scheduled to interview with some people from QA/Development.
When it came time for the interview, I only ended up speaking with one employee, and we mostly just chatted about what they do, and just tech/industry in general. It was (surprisingly) pretty easygoing. Afterwards, I was called to schedule an interview at HQ.
However, the one thing I did glean from both interviews was that you definitely had to be on-site, in the engineering offices, in California. I decided I wasn't willing to relocate, so I asked them to cancel the process.
Interview Questions
Other Details
The interview consisted of a Phone Interview and a 1:1 Interview.
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Business Development Intern at Palantir Technologies
Posted Dec 9, 2011
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4.0
Difficult Interview
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Overall Neutral Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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Interviewed Oct 2011 (took a day)
Scheduled an interview with one of the developers. Asked me about my background and what languages I knew. I told him LISP and Java, and he started asking me to compare & contrast the two languages. After that, he asked me an algorithm question: "How to find n numbers in a list that sums to 0". He walked me through it and repeatedly asked me about the runtime. I didn't know too much of this stuff, so I knew I wasn't getting an offer, but it was cool to experience it.
Interview Questions
Other Details
The interview consisted of a Phone Interview.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
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