I applied through an employee referral. The process took 3 months. I interviewed at Palantir Technologies (Palo Alto, CA) in Nov 2012
Interview
I met an early employee of Palantir at a conference and he put me into the recruiting system. We did a phone interview, and then scheduled an in person interview. They paid for my travel to attend a four hour interview process. Others have described the process as being a cattle call, and I found that to be an apt and accurate description.
The interview process was a big production but in the end didn't have much substance. They flew me all the way over there, and then didn't seem to actually have any real questions to ask me once I was there. This is a problem that I have run into interviewing as a senior statistician. They want to give a hard technical interview, but don't seem to know what questions to ask someone like me. Even though they ended each interview chunk with a 'do you have any questions' moment, the interviewers were so clearly rushed and frazzled I didn't really feel like questions were all that welcome.
The whole process felt more like applying for grad school at Stanford than applying for an actual job. They seemed more concerned with assessing if I was a 'winner' (with all of the implied superficiality and vagueness) than whether or not I would be a good addition to their team. This was kind of sad too, because everyone I talked to was soooo tired. They really seemed like they could use some help.
Even though everyone tried really hard to be nice, and they were quite generous with my travel accommodations, the overall process was pretty demoralizing. I left feeling judged but not really measured. That seems to be the Silicon Valley culture these days.
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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