I applied online. The process took 7 weeks. I interviewed at Palantir Technologies (London, England) in Sep 2017
Interview
The interview process began with a reasonably tricky Hackerrank challenge which was to be completed in around 75 minutes. After successfully completing this stage, I was advanced to a behavioural phone screen which was a short ~20-30 minute phone call with a recruiter about my resumé and talking a little bit about what I liked about my past jobs. Here they are trying to see if you are the right culture fit and have the correct motivation for wanting to work at Palantir. The third stage was a phone technical interview using Hackerrank Codepair. The task took around 1 hour and was a relatively average task - an interface was defined and you had to implement the methods. After this stage is the on-site - this was a painful 5.5 hour day at their office with 4 back-to-back interviews followed by lunch with an engineer (which I was told wasn't part of the assessment, but you never know). The interviews covered a range of things from 'Decomp', algorithms, system design, and data structures. After this, I was told I would hear back about the next stage in a few days. A week later I still heard nothing so sent a follow up and almost instantly found out I was rejected. Disappointing, but there was an opportunity for a short feedback call to find out what went wrong. I was told I could do most of the challenges but was just 'a little bit too slow'. Overall I did enjoy the hiring process, though it did drag on for many weeks, and at times communication could have been better, but on the whole everybody seemed well organised and competent.
I interviewed at Palantir Technologies (New York, NY)
Interview
I directly gave the technical interview, which was about 50 minutes long. The interviewer was nice, and the interview itself felt collaborative, where I could ask questions and share various problem-solving approaches.
I applied through an employee referral. I interviewed at Palantir Technologies
Interview
I applied with a referral
Multiple rounds -
1. HR screen
2. decomposition round
3. onsite with 3 interviews (coding, learning, and decomposition)
4. hiring manager (didn't make it past this one)
Took them about 5 weeks after the hiring manager round to update me that I wasn't selected
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The hiring manager round got really deep into my career motivations
I had behavioral interviews and then 4 in person interviews. The behavioral was straightforward. There was also a data query interview where they taught you a new "language" and had you execute basic queries in it. Then there was a system design interview. I had two of these. The last one they asked me if I was deployed to the moon to identify new species of alien what kind of system would I build.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
If you were deployed to the moon to identify new species of alien what kind of system would I build.
Forward Deployed Engineer applicants have rated the interview process at Palantir Technologies with 3.4 out of 5 (where 5 is the highest level of difficulty) and assessed their interview experience as 60% positive. To compare, the company-average is 46.4% positive. This is according to Glassdoor user ratings.
Candidates applying for Forward Deployed Engineer roles take an average of 28 days to get hired, when considering 150 user submitted interviews for this role. To compare, the hiring process at Palantir Technologies overall takes an average of 28 days.
Common stages of the interview process at Palantir Technologies as a Forward Deployed Engineer according to 150 Glassdoor interviews include:
Phone interview: 39%
One on one interview: 27%
Skills test: 18%
Personality test: 5%
Presentation: 4%
Group panel interview: 3%
Background check: 3%
IQ intelligence test: 1%
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