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
Full Stack Engineer
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Behavioral
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easy
Palantir often works with sensitive government and defense contracts. Why do you want to work at Palantir, and how do you align with our mission?
#Motivation
#Company Values
#Ethics
Full Stack Engineer
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Behavioral
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medium
Tell me about a time you had to push back on a product requirement because of technical limitations or ethical concerns.
#Communication
#Conflict Resolution
#Integrity
Full Stack Engineer
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Behavioral
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medium
Describe a situation where you had to dive into a completely unfamiliar, poorly documented codebase and deliver a critical feature under a tight deadline.
#Adaptability
#Problem Solving
#Resilience
Full Stack Engineer
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Behavioral
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medium
Tell me about a time you disagreed with a senior engineer on a system design choice. How did you resolve it?
#Collaboration
#Communication
#Ego Management
Full Stack Engineer
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Behavioral
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medium
How do you handle working on projects with highly ambiguous requirements and shifting deadlines, which is common in our Forward Deployed engineering roles?
#Ambiguity
#Agile
#Client Management
Full Stack Engineer
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Behavioral
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medium
Describe a time you optimized a system or process that saved the company significant time, resources, or money.
#Initiative
#Impact
#Technical Excellence
Full Stack Engineer
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Behavioral
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medium
Tell me about a time you failed to deliver on a commitment or caused a production outage. What happened, and what did you learn?
#Accountability
#Growth Mindset
#Post-mortems
Full Stack Engineer
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Coding
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medium
Given a list of server logs containing timestamps, IP addresses, and login status (SUCCESS/FAILURE), write a function to find all IP addresses that had more than N failed login attempts within a rolling 5-minute window.
#Sliding Window
#Hash Map
#Log Parsing
Full Stack Engineer
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Coding
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medium
Palantir Apollo manages software deployments. Given a list of microservices and their dependencies, write an algorithm to determine a valid deployment order. If a circular dependency exists, return an error.
#Graphs
#Topological Sort
#DFS/BFS
Full Stack Engineer
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Coding
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hard
Implement an in-memory Key-Value store that supports standard GET, SET, and DELETE operations, as well as nested transactions with BEGIN, COMMIT, and ROLLBACK.
#Hash Map
#Stack
#System Design Fundamentals
Full Stack Engineer
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Coding
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medium
Given a 2D grid representing a map in Palantir Gotham where 0 is an open path, 1 is an obstacle, and 2 is a high-risk zone, find the shortest path from start to destination avoiding obstacles and minimizing travel through high-risk zones.
#Graphs
#Dijkstra's Algorithm
#BFS
Full Stack Engineer
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Coding
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medium
Write a function to merge overlapping intervals. You are given a massive stream of telemetry data where each entry has a start and end timestamp. Output the consolidated periods of continuous activity.
#Sorting
#Arrays
#Intervals
Full Stack Engineer
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Coding
•
medium
Design a Rate Limiter for a public-facing Palantir API. Implement the logic to allow a maximum of X requests per Y seconds per customer ID.
#Token Bucket
#Concurrency
#Hash Map
Full Stack Engineer
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Coding
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medium
Given a directed graph representing an ontology mapping in Palantir Foundry, write a function to detect if there is a cycle in the graph.
#Graphs
#DFS
#Cycle Detection
Full Stack Engineer
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Coding
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hard
Implement a text justification algorithm. Given an array of words and a width maxWidth, format the text such that each line has exactly maxWidth characters and is fully (left and right) justified.
#Strings
#Simulation
#Greedy
Full Stack Engineer
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Coding
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hard
Design a data structure that supports inserting a number and finding the median of all inserted numbers in O(1) or O(log N) time. This is used for real-time anomaly detection in sensor streams.
#Heaps
#Design
Full Stack Engineer
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Coding
•
medium
Implement an LRU (Least Recently Used) Cache. It should support get and put operations in O(1) average time complexity.
#Hash Map
#Doubly Linked List
#Design
Full Stack Engineer
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Coding
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hard
Write a basic regular expression parser that supports '.' (matches any single character) and '*' (matches zero or more of the preceding element).
#Dynamic Programming
#Recursion
#Strings
Full Stack Engineer
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Coding
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easy
Given an array of integers representing daily financial transactions, find the contiguous subarray with the maximum sum. This is used to identify periods of highest financial anomaly.
#Arrays
#Dynamic Programming
#Kadane's Algorithm
Full Stack Engineer
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Coding
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medium
Implement a function to play the game of Battleship. Given a board with ships, write a function that takes a coordinate and returns 'Hit', 'Miss', or 'Sunk'.
#Matrix
#Simulation
#Object-Oriented Design
Full Stack Engineer
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Coding
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easy
Given a string containing just the characters '(', ')', '{', '}', '[' and ']', determine if the input string is valid. Used for validating JSON-like configurations in Foundry.
#Stack
#Strings
Full Stack Engineer
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System Design
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hard
Design a system to ingest, process, and query millions of flight telemetry events per second. The system needs to support real-time alerting and historical analysis.
#Streaming
#Big Data
#Databases
#Scalability
Full Stack Engineer
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System Design
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medium
Design a distributed rate limiter for Palantir's API gateway that can handle millions of requests per second across multiple global data centers.
#Distributed Systems
#Caching
#Concurrency
Full Stack Engineer
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System Design
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hard
Design a real-time collaborative dashboard (similar to Palantir Foundry's Contour). Users should be able to edit charts and see changes from other users instantly.
#WebSockets
#Operational Transformation
#CRDTs
#Frontend Architecture
Full Stack Engineer
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System Design
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hard
Design an access control system (RBAC/ABAC) for highly sensitive government data. How do you ensure that a user only sees the rows and columns they are explicitly cleared for?
#Security
#Database Design
#Microservices
Full Stack Engineer
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System Design
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hard
Design a log aggregation and search system capable of ingesting petabytes of logs from distributed Palantir Apollo nodes and allowing full-text search.
#Search Engines
#Distributed Systems
#Storage
Full Stack Engineer
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System Design
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hard
Design a system to sync data between a disconnected edge device (e.g., a submarine or aircraft) and the central cloud once connectivity is restored.
#Edge Computing
#Data Synchronization
#Conflict Resolution
Full Stack Engineer
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System Design
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medium
Design a distributed job scheduler for data pipelines in Palantir Foundry. It must handle job dependencies, retries, and worker node failures.
#Distributed Systems
#Task Queues
#Fault Tolerance
Full Stack Engineer
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Technical
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hard
Design the frontend architecture and API for a graph visualization tool handling tens of thousands of nodes. How do you ensure smooth rendering and interaction?
#React
#Canvas/WebGL
#API Design
#Performance Optimization
Full Stack Engineer
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Technical
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medium
Build a React component that fetches and displays a paginated, sortable data table of user permissions. It must handle loading states, error states, and debounce search inputs.
#React
#Hooks
#State Management
#Asynchronous JavaScript
Full Stack Engineer
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Technical
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medium
How would you implement optimistic UI updates for a collaborative ontology editor where users are frequently updating node properties?
#UX
#State Management
#API Integration
Full Stack Engineer
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Technical
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medium
Design a RESTful API for a document management system with version control. Include endpoints for creating, updating, retrieving specific versions, and listing history.
#REST
#HTTP Methods
#Database Schema
Full Stack Engineer
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Technical
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medium
Explain how you would optimize a slow-loading React application that renders large datasets. What tools and techniques would you use to profile and fix it?
#React Profiler
#Memoization
#Code Splitting
#Virtualization
Full Stack Engineer
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Technical
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medium
Write a SQL query to find the top 3 users by activity volume within the last 30 days, handling ties appropriately.
#SQL
#Window Functions
#Aggregations
Full Stack Engineer
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Technical
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medium
Describe how you would handle state management in a complex React application for a Palantir Foundry module. Compare Redux, Context API, and Zustand.
#React
#State Management
#Architecture
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.