My interview with Palantir is probably my most favorite interview of all time. My first interview was with an engineer at a job fair. After telling me a little bit about the company, he asked me some very basic personality questions. He then gave me a series (3?) of fairly challenging algorithm problems. I remember the solutions being non-obvious, but simple. He had me write the solutions in pseudocode on the back of my resume and hand it in. My second interview was over the phone and very much like the first. I was given another set of algorithm problems, one of them was a repeat from the job fair. This time I simply had to describe the solutions to the interviewer. My third interview was also conducted over the phone. I was given a few relatively simple problems and told to write the solutions in C code and speak it to the interviewer. Semicolons included. I was not expecting this kind of test AT ALL, and I hadn't written C code for a year or so. At that time, it would have been taken me a little extra time to write it in an IDE, much less writing it down and speaking it over the phone. Anyways, I ended up making quite a few errors, which when combined with my "uhhhs" and "ummmms" surely prevented me from going any further. I didn't think my final interview was conducted too fairly. Had I been given some warning that I'd be literally speaking in C code, I could have at least brushed up on syntax and standard libraries. I'm also not entirely sure I understand the need to vet everyone with difficult algorithms questions when the work sounded like pretty run-of-the-mill software development. Regardless, I very much enjoyed the interviews - they were quite challenging.

Started with a recruiter screen where the whole point is just checking if you actually care about their mission and the real-world impact of their software, rather than just wanting a cool tech job. After that was a 90 minute hackerrank OA that felt more like an implementation mini-project with SQL and Python instead of abstract algorithms. The onsite was a 4-round loop chosen from decomp, re-engineering, learning, coding, and sys design. Decomp is the most important one - they give you a super vague prompt like designing a chess game or tracking a disease from scratch, and you have to map out the inputs and logic out loud. Re-engineering gives you around 1000 lines of code with a very subtle logical bug to fix, and the learning round drops you into a random API with barely any documentation to see how fast you pick it up lol. Coding was standard LC mediums but they squeeze a 20-minute behavioral chat right into the middle of it, and sys design was heavy on data governance and fault tolerance. The final chat with the hiring manager is pretty intense too ngl. They will actually make you redo parts of the onsite you struggled with. For prep, don't just mindlessly grind LeetCode. Practice reading other people's code fast and structuring ambiguous problems. I got a really good Palantir coach on Prepfully who helped a lot to catch my blind spots and get a reality check before the actual loop. Overall, not very easy though