Palantir Software Engineer Interview Guide

The overview of a Palantir software engineer interview loop typically looks like:

• Recruiter screen
• Technical screen
• Onsite, 3-4 rounds drawn from a pool of 5 formats:
  Decomposition 
  Learning
  Re-engineering
  Coding
  System Design
• Hiring manager interview

The entire loop from first contact to an offer typically takes anywhere between 3-4 weeks.

This is a short 30 minute call with a recruiter. Apart from doing the obvious bits like a background check, most of their time will be spent on trying to understand why you're applying in the first place. Sometimes, you might also face some basic coding-related questions.

Now, there are two questions you NEED to be crystal clear about:

• Do you want to be an SWE or FDSE?

Palantir runs two engineering roles under names it invented for itself. A dev sits in product development and builds the platforms Foundry and Gotham. A delta is an FDSE and sits in business development and takes those platforms into a customer's environment to solve something specific. You should have some serious conviction about why you're applying for either of these roles, because the recruiter will ask follow-ups about it.

Palantir officially published an article by Chinemerem E. who talks about her journey as a Palantirian in the article Who Wants to be a Delta. It’s a peep through the keyhole into what the work entails and is a good yardstick to measure your skills against.

• Why Palantir?

The recruiter could even plainly ask if you've read their mission and which parts you agree with and which ones you don't. They want to make sure that you're not chasing comp or prestige so you want to stay mum about salary expectations or your position for other companies you’re interviewing with.

This is the first step in the interview process and only after this do you even sit for the technical rounds. Engineers (regrettably) mentioned that they had all the technical chops but couldn't make it past because recruiters weren’t convinced they’d fit in.

There are two formats in circulation and you might get either.

The live version runs about an hour and has historically gone through Karat or through CodePair with a Palantir engineer on the other end. It's also possible that the screen is conducted in house. Either way, you'll spend roughly 45 minutes on a single technical question and about 15 on a behavioral one.

The other format is a 90 minute HackerRank assessment. This will have a coding problem, an SQL query along with a REST API task. A Prepfully candidate says it’s like an implementation mini-project in SQL and Python and not some abstract algorithm set. The API task hands you a paginated JSON endpoint and asks you to aggregate a field across the records.

Don't worry too much about the specific question itself. It could be related to backend systems, UX design, or anything else. What's important is that you can demonstrate your problem-solving skills and your ability to work through a coding question.

Think about the high-level design before writing code, and still put down a simple version first. As a general rule of thumb, you should explain your approach to your interviewer, and agree on it before you even start to write code. In fact, some candidates said that their interviewers were actively waiting for that step and held back on the “go ahead”.

Unlike most companies that run a standardized loop and put every candidate through it, Palantir runs a 3-round onsite drawing from the 5 formats:

• Decomposition 
• Learning
• Re-engineering
• Coding
• System Design

There have been cases where they've run a 2 round or even a 4 round onsite. 

Regardless of the structure of the onsite, what's constant is that there's no standalone behavioral round. About 15-20 minutes of every technical round are cordoned off for behavioral questions. If you map it out, that's roughly an hour of behavioral assessment delivered in pieces by the engineers who are also watching you code. 

• These behavioral questions can be on lines of:
• What's the accomplishment you're proudest of so far in your career?
• Tell me about working with someone whose style was very different from yours.
• Tell me about a time you used data to clarify something when everybody else was working off instincts.
• Give me an example of you prioritizing ruthlessly.

To see the entire list of candidate and interviewer reported questions grouped by round, head over to our free Palantir SWE question bank. 

1. Decomposition

This is a 60 minute round that typically everyone gets, regardless of whatever else their loop may be. Going by Palantir's own description quoted from a recruiter packet, DCOMP questions test breaking an abstract question into the pieces that make a practical solution. By design, the prompts you face will be open-ended, with no right or wrong answer.

Their official guide for Navigating Open-ended Problems lists the stages solving such a problem would go through and it’s pretty much exactly how the onsite round runs:

1. Building a complex system with multiple parts, all from scratch
2. Introducing a new solution to an existing large code base
3. Solving the problem with constraints like limited time and resources
4. Enabling a workflow for which an ideal solution doesn't exist

The round runs in two phases. In the first, for ideation, you'll break down the problem into parts and agree upon a solution with the interviewer. In execution, you'll get into designing it at a high level, writing pseudo code at most. Some candidates say they were pushed into schema and low-level logic by the interviewer. 

Palantir says they work with urgent real world problems that need solutions that work before there's time to make them perfect. This is the mindset you need to have while approaching the prompts in this round. 

Recently reported prompts:

• Design a chess game in Python
• Design a technology to help senior citizens with glaucoma cook for themselves
• Design a system for tracking disease from patient zero

What's super important here is that you clarify where that data comes from before you begin to design anything. Demarcate the ownership of different teams and raise operational constraints before the interviewer has to remind you to.

What we suggest to most candidates is to build an app that solves a problem in your own life (like OP in the screenshot). You can sit down with a Palantir engineer, find a public dataset and do something interesting with it. They'll help you work out what technical problems the developers must have hit, and how they must have researched to solve them. 

2. Learning

In this round, you're handed an unfamiliar concept or API, and the interviewer is positioned as your reference manual. The competency that Palantir would be testing here is called Solving Technical Problems, and in the round, each problem gets harder as you go ahead.

Some candidates are handed working modules and asked to extend them, documentation supplied and the language left to them, usually a choice between Python, Java and TypeScript. Others are dropped into an API carrying almost none.

The tasks candidates have been handed recently are:

• Implementing a package installer resembling npm that pulls packages from more than one repo using multithreading, built against the Python concurrent library, across 5 tasks of increasing difficulty.
• Reading a provided codebase, explaining what they understood from it, then modifying a similar one.
• Extending a set of existing modules using a library they were given the documentation for.

Don't be afraid to ask a lot of questions, because the test is to see how you’d work in environments that feel radically unfamiliar at first. You need to make sure you give them proof that you, well, learn. Don’t rush to prove your debugging prowess. Take them through your thinking and learning process. 

This is not the kind of round where you can revise something so remember:

A new problem is rarely an unfamiliar one. So when you strip away the details, it could reveal something you've already solved. Approach the problem with first principles thinking because more often than not, it’s assumptions that make the problem harder than it is. If a pattern doesn't surface, solve a deliberately simplified version or a single special case. And if nothing works, try generalizing the problem all the way. For the sake of brevity, we’d put it as: start with what you know.

3. Re-engineering

You'll be handed an existing codebase of approx 500-1000 lines where there are issues with the output. You'll be told how the system is supposed to behave. Usually, the issues are all logical ones and not syntax so nothing fails to compile and nothing underlines itself in red. You'll then be asked to pitch a confident decision about how to fix a bug, even though you lack a complete understanding of the system.

You can understand the motive of the interviewer better when you read a small excerpt of a transcript from one of our mocks: 

“You know, sometimes, we'll have a scenario in our mind. Say there was an operational outage at the customer side. We're going to ask you how you plan to get the system back online and get rid of all the risks without having to read all of the code.”

This round is essentially a test of how well you can work with code you've inherited. You'll want to suppress any instinct that tells you the codebase is outright wrong and the solution is to painstakingly rewrite it. A developer spends far more time debugging and extending existing code than writing anything from the ground up, and that third-party components are always in the mix. Palantir views programming as a “creative and expressive” medium so you don’t want to come off as a snob when you’re going through code written by someone else. 

Our coaches advise that you form hypotheses and test them instead of reading through every single line of every file. You have to be nimble though, because some candidates have told us that interviewers have planted red herrings, so that could be a problem if you commit to the first suspicious thing you find. You'll have to survey broadly and test a couple of hypotheses at once before you lock in. 

4. Coding

This is a 60 minute round in CodePair that's somewhat similar to the technical screen. Like mentioned earlier, you should expect about a 20 minute behavioral segment anywhere during the round. 

The difficulty sits around LeetCode easy-medium (the easier side of medium), because the problem arrives underspecified and wrapped in an end user system. That means evaluation is not just on your code but also the kind of clarifying questions you ask.

Addressing code, the standard is that it is 

• Efficient: running at optimal performance and scales
• Effective: no bugs and easy to test
• Easy to maintain and upgrade (down to variable naming)

Language-wise, anything imperative (even older ones like Visual Basic and Perl) is welcome, leaving out non-imperative ones and “ancient” ones like Cobol and Fortran.

Generally speaking, interviewers won't ask about obscure features of a particular language because they're way more interested in you as a coder and not in your memory. 

Also, you should be prepared to explain your thinking on a whiteboard, a good chunk of candidates have been asked to. 

Following the coding problem, you could be faced with questions that Palantir engineers themselves argue about, like:

• When should data be replicated across several storage formats, each tuned for a different kind of query, instead of being stored once and optimized for space? 
• On a server with a lot of memory, which part of the data should be held resident, how is it kept in sync, and how is it reached fastest? 
• When is a bottleneck processor-bound and when is it I/O-bound?

Once you have a working baseline, be prepared to address caching and pre-computation in the next step. More importantly, you should proactively talk about ambiguous inputs or malicious user cases before the interviewer has to intervene and bring them up.

5. System design

This round will be conducted in CodePad using the whiteboard, and once again you should expect a couple of behavioral questions. It's possible that some loops fold the design work into the decomposition, which is why the public record on this is scattered.

If you face another design round after DCOMP, expect drilling on architecture, data permissions, workflows, auditability, and tradeoffs, while keeping SWE and Forward Deployed Software Engineer (FDSE) expectations separate.

Palantir-style, system design prompts can be:

• Design permissions for a data platform where different users can see different slices of sensitive data
• Design a system to prevent blackouts in a power grid
• Design a workflow that builds a knowledge graph from multiple complex data sources to help analysts

If you want to brush up on the format (esp if you’re interviewing at other companies that definitely have this round) please refer to our System Design guide for more details. 

This can be 1-2 calls that are 30-60 minutes long and are said to be surface level and free flowing. The conversation will address anything that might’ve been marked as “unresolved” from the previous rounds so it could be a technical or non-technical conversation. 

Expect the HM to ask you again why you want to join Palantir with the expectation of an improved answer now that you sat through all the rounds. 

PS: This is also the call where team matching happens.

Levels.fyi, as of August 2026, puts US software engineer total compensation between $145K and $436K USD.