Recruiting at Palantir: My Experience

I have been following Palantir’s work since 2014, when I read Peter Thiel’s book Zero to One as a freshman in high school. Last fall, I was lucky enough to land an internship at Palantir. Because I greatly benefited from online resources throughout the recruiting process, I wanted to give back by writing a series of medium articles outlining my recruiting experiences.

This article will discuss the recruiting process at Palantir. Next, I will write about how I was able to land an offer at companies like Palantir, Microsoft, and Bloomberg. If that sounds interesting, stay tuned. If you’d like help with recruiting, check out the website I run.

Recruiting Process Outline

Palantir is known for being very selective. As a result, their recruiting process is really long. Before we dive into each step, here is the general outline:

1. Submit your resume online
2. Online Coding Test
3. Interview with a Recruiter
4. First Round Technical Interview
5. Super Day
6. Hiring Manager Interview

If you’re thinking “This is impossibly long”, I understand. I felt the same way. Don’t think about this process that way — take it one step at a time. It will help you relax and focus on being productive.

Submitting Your Resume

This step is quite straight forward — just submit your resume online. If you want some tips on writing a great resume, stay tuned — that article is coming. If you want me to read your resume and give you feedback, check this out.

The Online Coding Test

This is a fairly standard first step at most companies. Palantir’s online coding tests are usually quite challenging Hackerrank problems. Expect to have to solve a couple of problems in 90 minutes or so.

Interview with a Recruiter

If you think that you can take this interview lightly, don’t. Palantir takes culture fit extremely seriously. Because the working environment is extremely fast paced, both you and the recruiter must ensure that there is a strong cultural fit. If you are not excited about the company’s mission, it is unlikely that you will succeed at solving the extremely hard problems Palanterians tackle. As a result, make sure to research the company. Read Palantir’s Blog, watch Youtube videos, and try to talk to people working at the company. If you don’t see a fit, be honest with yourself. If what you find out about Palantir excites you, think about what you would respond to classic behavioral questions and make sure to articulate your answers well.

First Round Technical Interview

In my experience, this was a one a hour interview conducted via Karat. It consisted of two main parts. For the first 20 minutes I was asked behavioral questions such as “Talk to me about your favorite side project” and “Discuss your previous work experience”. These questions are very dependent on your resume — if you do not have previous internship experiences, chances are your interview will revolve around your projects (and if you don’t have projects, start working on one yesterday). The last 40 minutes will consist of Data Structures and Algorithms problems. The interviewer will continue giving you problems until time runs out, but you should aim to solve at least 2 problems. To do well on this section, make sure you get your Leetcode grind in.

The Super Day

If you are invited to a super day, get excited! You will be flown to one of Palantir’s offices on an all expenses paid trip (unless, like in my case, you have to do the interviews via Zoom because of a global pandemic). This is the most challenging step of the recruiting process. In my experience, it was about 4 hours in total: 3 back to back one hour interviews with a 10 minute break in-between, followed by a 30 minute debrief with my recruiter. While they will all contain a couple of behavioral questions, the three technical interviews are quite different from one another. One is a coding interview where you will have to solve one or more Data Structures and Algorithms problems. Another will be a “Learning Interview”, where you will be asked to use documentation to learn a new language and solve some problems using it. Lastly, there will be a systems design interview. Here, you will be asked something like design a program to match professors and students with similar interests. You will need to discuss everything in detail. Think UI/UX, frontend, backend, database schemas, and testing. If this sounds scary to you, I get it. I felt the same way. But I promise that your interviewers will make these conversations extremely fun. Seriously — my Palantir interviewers were incredibly nice, smart and interesting people. To be honest with you, one of the reasons I decided to join Palantir was because I wanted to work with people like this.

The Hiring Manager Interview

If you make it to this stage, congratulations! You are almost there. You should be extremely happy with yourself, as you have managed to pass an extremely hard set of interviews! Unfortunately, you can’t relax yet. Palantir’s hiring manager interview is by no means a formality. In fact, chances are that it will include a technical question. Based on your super day performance, this may be a Learning, Systems Design, or Coding question. You will also be asked behavioral questions. Once again, your interview will be very interested in wether or not you fit in with the company culture. Do you enjoy working on a specific part of the stack or are you problem-solving oriented? Does the idea of a flat engineering culture excite you? There are no right or wrong answers to these questions. It is extremely important that you think about these questions and answer them truthfully. Your answers will not only help you and your interviewer evaluate wether there is a cultural fit, but it will also help the hiring committee find projects you are interested in in case you are offered a job.

The Decision

Palantir takes hiring very seriously. The reason they are so selective is that even after you go through all these interviews, the founders of the company must approve your application for you to get an offer. I am not kidding. Every single one of your interviewers will have to contribute to writing an essay that outlines why Palantir should hire you. If the founders agree, you will get an offer.

If you do get an offer, congratulations! Reach out to me on LinkedIn or via Email and let’s chat. If you didn’t, don’t be discouraged — there are a lot of other great companies out there, and you can always try again.

If you received an offer from Palantir as well as other companies and are trying to decide between them, stay tuned: I will be writing an article about how I went about making this decision. If you have very specific questions, feel free to sign up for a one on one chat.

I hope this article was helpful, and good luck!