Experience
60%
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Helpful (1)
Application
I applied through an employee referral. I interviewed at Palantir Technologies.
Interview
Standard coding questions, leetcode medium level. 3 or 4 interviews before lunch. Answered all correctly, second interview went especially well, finished all questions the interviewer had and had a very friendly chat for the rest of the time. Then got rejected. I've gotten intern offers at much better companies (Microsoft, Google, FB, Airbnb, Jane Street) so it was pretty jarring.
Interview Questions
Interview
The coding assessment was three questions on typosquatting, which is basically asking string variations on different domain names. The other two questions were just add-ons to the first question. aa aa
Interview Questions
Application
I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Palantir Technologies in September 2020.
Interview
I first spoke with a recruiter who was very helpful and kind. The first actual interview was with Karat, which made the interview a bit weird - she did not seem excited to be there and was not very helpful, differing from interviews with engineers at other companies. She asked 3 run time questions and 2 leetcode-y questions, the second being an optimization of the first.
Interview Questions
Interview
Took a very long time to hear back (around 2 months), but response after the interview was very timely and smooth.
Interview Questions
Application
I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Palantir Technologies (Palo Alto, CA (US)) in November 2012.
Interview
One phone interview followed by an in person interview at the Palo Alto location. The company is very good to its potential interns. When I interviewed at the location, there were about 25 other interns doing the same. Apparently they get this many potential interns on a weekly basis.
Interview Questions
Helpful (35)
Application
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Palantir Technologies (Palo Alto, CA (US)) in March 2012.
Interview
I was scheduled firstly for an on-site interview because of a referral. Three days after that, I got a call from one of the interviewers that I would have a Skype phone call with the founder of the company a week later. Three more days after that Skype call, I got a call from that interviewer again, saying that I had an offer.
The on-site interviews were all coding-based – they asked me questions that looked initially easy but blew up in my face, and questions that were just hard from the beginning. I had to ask for help for at least a quarter of them, and the interviewers also helped me debug 2 of them. I couldn’t answer one. I must say that it was, though grueling, an interesting, and in some ways, a fun experience.
Overall, this company was pretty intense. One of the things I noticed first when I went for my on-site interview was that the employees loved coding, and the company of others who love working with tech like they do. They're all extremely smart, and they enjoy that extremely intelligent atmosphere - they can all hold each other up in projects, and also work on all kinds of different things. It also means many of them can interview you - when I went on-site, I was there for 9 hours, and was grilled by 5 different people, for 1 hour each.
If you are going for an interview here, remember to be yourself. Though you will be interviewed alongside master’s student candidates, and maybe even people from out of the county, this is one of the most important things. Though it may seem like at such a high-stakes company, and you want to put your best out there, it is especially important to be real. Don’t stretch the truth about what you can or can’t do, and at the same time, don’t be intimidated by all of the flashy stuff (like a limo to the company, etc). They are looking for a good fit, and a good fit is a hard worker who is smart but doesn’t ruin their atmosphere of equality among all their workers. Sure, you’ll need a certain degree of professionalism to get this job, but this is equally important.
Interview Questions
Negotiation
I didn't negotiate at all. I never expected to be offered as much pay as I was when I got this job offer.
Helpful (8)
Application
The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Palantir Technologies (Palo Alto, CA (US)) in March 2012.
Interview
The interview process consisted of two phone interviews and then an on-site interview.
The first phone interview was an algorithms-based one and the second one was a coding-one. Both interviews had some questions ranging from medium to hard difficulty. The coding one was especially stressful as the questions were not trivial (reverse a list, find duplicates, etc) but were still algorithmically somewhat interesting.
The on-site interview was intense. I was driven in a limo over to the Palo Alto site, and it consisted of breakfast, 2 interviews, lunch, 3 more interviews, founders interview, and then dinner. People usually stay for dinner but I had another event planned that night so I skipped out on the dinner. All interview questions are tough. Most of the questions I had to ask for help/hints to get the answer. I still ended up getting the offer though :)
Also, this place is like an interview slaughterhouse. When I was there, I estimate they interviewed 20-30 people that day, and it seems like they interview that many people onsite at least 3 days a week.
Negotiation
I did not choose to negotiate. They pay more than what I would've thought.
Helpful (2)
Application
I applied through college or university. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Palantir Technologies in February 2012.
Interview
Met with some recruiters at a career fair at my university. About a week later I got contacted for a phone interview. He asked me basic questions about data structures that I was able to answer, then I was asked one coding question that wasn't hard, but I was flustered because it was my first interview and took too long to answer it.
Interviewer was rude and talked down to me throughout the entire process.
Interview Questions
Application
I applied through college or university. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Palantir Technologies (Palo Alto, CA (US)) in February 2012.
Interview
Applied to a software engineering internship through my University's job center. Received a 30 minute phone screen and then an hour long in-person interview on campus. While both were technical, the phone screen was a lot more intense than the in-person interview. They were both entirely algorithmically focussed and for some odd reason, I only ever saw dynamic programming question. As a result, I didn't really feel like it required lots of knowledge and was only moderately difficult, although your mileage may vary.
Didn't fly down to Palo Alto at the time and I declined the offer. A year later, they contacted me again, offering to fly me down to Palo Alto and see the offices. I was then extended an offer again without having to interview.
Interview Questions
Reasons for Declining
Their recruiter at the time was non-existent. I had little to no communication with the recruiting team and by the time I finished the interview, I still knew very little about Palantir. It should be noted that, when recruiters from Palantir reached out to me again, they were much better and I accepted their offer.
Helpful (5)
Application
I applied online. The process took a week. I interviewed at Palantir Technologies in February 2012.
Interview
I applied online because a friend of mine had worked there last summer and had a really positive experience there. I had 2 phone interviews
Interview Questions
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