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Palantir Technologies

Is this your company?

Amazing company with important work and positive culture, but feeling some growing pains - Forward Deployed Engineer Palantir Technologies Employee Review

4.0
Nov 2, 2012
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- Important work. We have opportunities here to leverage technology against our customers' hardest challenges and make a significant impact. - Incredibly talented and motivated colleagues. - An amazing product. Unlike other companies where I've worked, Palantir does not send their BD/implementation teams out to sell and service a product with gaping holes and bugs. - The company and employees don't take themselves too seriously, but we take our work very seriously. At Palantir, we have a laid-back meritocracy favoring problem solving and entrepreneurship. - Great benefits and perks. Palantir covers 100% of our health insurance premium, as well as other perks to make life easier. - We are moving towards a better work-life balance. We will always have plenty of work to do here, but as we are able to recruit and hire more employees, and the average age of employees increases, the culture is shifting subtly towards better balance.

Cons

- Though transparency is a corporate value here, as we continue to grow, decisions are made by a smaller percentage of the company and the results and reasoning behind those decisions is disseminated slowly. - Professional development has not been a priority during the company's first years. - The culture is changing. We're not a start-up anymore and fewer new hires act like owners, despite stock options.

Explore other reviews about Palantir Technologies

5.0
Jun 21, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Hyper intelligent people, interesting problem sets, amazing technology, three meals a day, flexibility

Cons

Pay is below market, workload is exceptionally high

2.0
Mar 8, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- Most talented, smart and industrious group of people I've ever worked with. Unfortunately, smart people can be easily deceived.

Cons

If you are in Business Development (BD) - i.e. Delta or Echo - this job will be your life. They deliberately underhire - they claim it's to maintain the culture, but really it's to squeeze every ounce of productivity out of you. You are thrown into chaotic situations with no way out but to "chew glass and excrete product". Don't let the flat heirarchy and encouragement of confrontation / open debate deceive you. Karp has majority founder shares and calls the shots. The company is a dictatorship, not a democracy. Resourcing is a black box. If you are a U.S person without a clearance, you will be bait-and-switched into defense even if you thought you could avoid it. With clearance, you'll end up on something much worse. Trust your gut - the company's leadership are not wise, nuanced philosophers - they are spineless, shifty edgelords with no ethical red lines. As a FDE, you will spend half your time working around stupid limitations in the platform you could not foresee when making grand promises to the customer. Foundry is not a cutting edge product, just like Microsoft Suite is not a cutting edge product. Its just too broad for any other company to easily copy it. Palantir just brought middle-of-the-road Silicon valley tech to old-school government, slapped some AI integration onto it and shrouded it in a veil of mystery to make it seem cool and mysterious and appeal to retail investors.

5
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