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
DevOps Engineer
•
Behavioral
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hard
Palantir often deploys to highly constrained, air-gapped government environments. Tell me about a time you had to solve a complex infrastructure problem without access to the internet or standard package managers.
#Air-gapped
#Problem Solving
#Adaptability
DevOps Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Describe a time you caused a production outage. How did you handle the immediate crisis, and what was the outcome of the post-mortem?
#Incident Management
#Accountability
#Post-mortem
DevOps Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
medium
Tell me about a time you had to push back on a software engineering team because of an infrastructure security or stability concern.
#Communication
#Security
#Conflict Resolution
DevOps Engineer
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Behavioral
•
medium
How do you prioritize your work when multiple critical systems are alerting simultaneously and you are the primary on-call engineer?
#On-call
#Prioritization
#Incident Management
DevOps Engineer
•
Behavioral
•
easy
Why Palantir? How do you align with our mission of building software that protects privacy and civil liberties while enabling critical institutional operations?
#Mission Alignment
#Motivation
DevOps Engineer
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Behavioral
•
medium
Describe a situation where you had to work with incomplete documentation or a highly ambiguous problem statement to deliver an infrastructure project.
#Ambiguity
#Problem Solving
#Autonomy
DevOps Engineer
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Coding
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medium
Write a Python script to parse a 50GB Nginx access log file and output the top 10 IP addresses that received 5xx HTTP status codes.
#Python
#Log Parsing
#Memory Management
DevOps Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Write a function to determine if a given IPv4 CIDR block overlaps with any CIDR block in a provided list.
#Python
#Networking
#Algorithms
DevOps Engineer
•
Coding
•
hard
Implement a rate limiter in Python. You can choose the algorithm (e.g., Token Bucket, Leaky Bucket).
#Python
#System Design
#Concurrency
DevOps Engineer
•
Coding
•
easy
Write a Bash script to find all files in a directory hierarchy modified in the last 24 hours that contain the string 'ERROR'.
#Bash
#Linux
#Command Line
DevOps Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Write a script to automatically identify and rotate AWS IAM Access Keys for all users that are older than 90 days.
#Python
#AWS
#Boto3
#Security
DevOps Engineer
•
Coding
•
medium
Given an array of server logs where each log has a timestamp and an error code, write an algorithm to find the 5-minute window with the highest number of errors.
#Algorithms
#Sliding Window
#Python
DevOps Engineer
•
Coding
•
easy
Write a script to parse a JSON file containing AWS resource configurations and output a list of all S3 buckets that do not have encryption enabled.
#Python
#JSON
#AWS
DevOps Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a highly available, multi-region Kubernetes architecture for Palantir's Apollo platform that can survive a complete AWS region failure.
#Kubernetes
#AWS
#High Availability
#Disaster Recovery
DevOps Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design a centralized logging and telemetry system for a globally distributed platform operating across multiple cloud providers and on-prem data centers.
#Logging
#Observability
#Distributed Systems
DevOps Engineer
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System Design
•
hard
Design a system to securely and reliably transfer 50TB of sensitive data from an on-premise government facility to an AWS GovCloud environment.
#Data Transfer
#AWS
#Security
#Networking
DevOps Engineer
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System Design
•
medium
Design an automated CI/CD pipeline for deploying infrastructure changes to a highly secure, restricted environment.
#CI/CD
#Security
#Infrastructure as Code
DevOps Engineer
•
System Design
•
hard
Design an auto-scaling architecture for a Palantir Foundry data ingestion service that experiences sudden, unpredictable 100x traffic spikes.
#Auto-scaling
#AWS
#Queuing
#System Design
DevOps Engineer
•
System Design
•
medium
How would you architect a disaster recovery plan for a mission-critical PostgreSQL database cluster?
#Databases
#Disaster Recovery
#High Availability
DevOps Engineer
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Technical
•
hard
How does a Kubernetes Pod get an IP address? Explain the role of the CNI.
#Kubernetes
#Networking
#CNI
DevOps Engineer
•
Technical
•
hard
Troubleshoot a Linux server that has a load average of 50 but CPU utilization is under 5%. What steps do you take?
#Linux
#Performance Tuning
#I/O Wait
#Troubleshooting
DevOps Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
Explain the complete DNS resolution process when a user curls a Palantir Foundry URL from their terminal.
#DNS
#Networking
#TCP/IP
DevOps Engineer
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Technical
•
hard
Explain how mutual TLS (mTLS) works and how you would implement it between microservices in a Kubernetes cluster.
#Security
#mTLS
#Kubernetes
#Service Mesh
DevOps Engineer
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Technical
•
medium
You receive an alert that a critical StatefulSet (e.g., Elasticsearch) is in a CrashLoopBackOff state. Walk me through your debugging steps.
#Kubernetes
#Troubleshooting
#StatefulSets
DevOps Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
How do you manage and secure Terraform state files in a multi-developer, multi-environment infrastructure?
#Terraform
#Security
#State Management
DevOps Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
What happens when a Linux system runs out of inodes, even if there is plenty of disk space available? How do you fix it?
#Linux
#Filesystems
#Troubleshooting
DevOps Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
Explain the TCP 3-way handshake. How would you troubleshoot a situation where the handshake is failing (SYN sent, no SYN-ACK received)?
#TCP/IP
#Networking
#Troubleshooting
DevOps Engineer
•
Technical
•
hard
How does the Linux OOM (Out of Memory) killer decide which process to terminate?
#Linux
#Memory Management
#Kernel
DevOps Engineer
•
Technical
•
easy
What is the difference between Layer 4 and Layer 7 load balancing? When would you use one over the other?
#Networking
#Load Balancing
#OSI Model
DevOps Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
How do you handle secrets management in a modern DevOps stack (Terraform + Kubernetes)?
#Security
#Kubernetes
#Secrets Management
DevOps Engineer
•
Technical
•
hard
Explain how you would roll back a failed database migration in an automated CI/CD pipeline without causing downtime.
#Databases
#CI/CD
#Zero Downtime
DevOps Engineer
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Technical
•
medium
What happens when you type `ls -l` in a Linux terminal? Explain the system calls involved.
#Linux
#System Calls
#OS Internals
DevOps Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
Troubleshoot an issue where two microservices in different subnets cannot communicate, but they can communicate with the internet.
#Networking
#Troubleshooting
#Routing
DevOps Engineer
•
Technical
•
medium
Explain the difference between a Kubernetes Deployment and a StatefulSet. When must you use a StatefulSet?
#Kubernetes
#Architecture
DevOps Engineer
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Technical
•
hard
How do you secure a Kubernetes cluster running multi-tenant workloads where tenants should not be able to access each other's resources?
#Kubernetes
#Security
#Multi-tenancy
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.