Palantir
Big data analytics company for defense, intelligence, and enterprise.
5 Rounds
~28 Days
Very Hard
The Interview Loop
Recruiter Screen (30 min)
Standard fit check, behavioral questions, and resume overview.
Technical Loop (3-4 Rounds)
Deep dive into domain knowledge, coding, and system design.
Interview Question Bank
Data Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design an Entity Resolution system. You are ingesting millions of records from different government databases (e.g., DMV, Tax, Census). How do you design a pipeline to identify and merge records belonging to the same individual?
#Entity Resolution
#Data Pipelines
#Machine Learning
#Graph Processing
Data Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a data ingestion pipeline for high-frequency IoT sensor data coming from manufacturing plants. The data needs to be available for real-time anomaly detection and also stored for batch historical analysis.
#Streaming
#Lambda/Kappa Architecture
#Kafka
#Data Lake
Data Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a system to track data lineage across thousands of transformations. If a column in a source table is dropped, the system should instantly identify all downstream dashboards and datasets that will break.
#Metadata Management
#Graph Databases
#Data Lineage
Data Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a strict data access control system (Row and Column level security) for a government client where data visibility depends on the user's security clearance and geographic location.
#Security
#Access Control
#Data Governance
Data Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a distributed task scheduler similar to Apache Airflow or Palantir's Build system. It needs to execute thousands of interdependent data jobs across a cluster of machines.
#Distributed Systems
#Scheduling
#DAGs
Data Engineer
•
System Design
•
medium
Design a rate limiter for an API that ingests data from external client systems. The system must handle sudden spikes in traffic without dropping critical data.
#Rate Limiting
#API Design
#Distributed Systems
Data Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design an architecture for a real-time anomaly detection system for financial transactions to prevent fraud. The system must evaluate rules against a graph of known bad actors within 50 milliseconds.
#Real-time Processing
#Graph Databases
#Low Latency
Difficulty Radar
Based on recent AI-sourced data.
Meet Your Interviewers
The "Standard" Interviewer
Senior EngineerFocuses on core competencies, system constraints, and clear communication.
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Think Out Loud
Always explain your thought process before writing code or drawing architecture.