Palantir Software Engineer Interview Questions
29+ questions from real Palantir Software Engineer interviews, reported by candidates.
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For context, I have 8+ YOE as SWE and previously started a company. EDIT: I am not talking about working at Palantir. just mentioning that the term came from there. I'm mostly talking about AI compani
I previously shared some information about Palantir interviews. It seems many people failed the learning section. So this time, I want to describe my and my friend's learning experience in detail. The
This was my first recruiter reachout rejection in three months of job hunting. It was probably because I was too impulsive and unprepared. They basically just asked about my work experience on my resu
During the Palantir virtual onsite, I failed to complete the technical assessment within the time limit. I pursued an overly complex approach instead of a standard recursive solution, which prevented
For those of you about to undergo this journey, here is my experience (plz don't ask me what questions were asked): **Stage 1: Online Assessment** This shit was pretty awful, probably one of the harde
Palantir FDSE Interview Experience (REJECTION~)
Hello Everyone, I gathered a lot of resources while preparing for my Palantir interview. Although things didn’t go in my favor, I wanted to share my experience and insights from the process: # Intervi
I recently had my coding interview with them and now got moved to the virtual onsite. It is 2 back to back interviews. Does anyone have any tips for the decomposition / live learning rounds? If anyone
Q1 A sports coach must ensure that two teams in a competition are equally strong. Teams A and B have n and m players. The players\' skill levels are stored...
Palantir - NYC REJECT
Phone Screen Same question as this https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-question/4866657/2024-03-Palantir-Tech-Screening Proposed 2 pointer approach, follow up question was for if the query has multiple words, how would u do it. I told some...
Hi everyone. Wanted to give some guidance to my process thus far in the world of Palantir interviews and maybe get some feedback. (For context I've been a software engineer for 2.5 years) 1. Late Sept
Hello person looking for how to prep for a Palantir interview! Congrats on getting here, your mental toil has just begun! I got all the way to the final round (hiring manager) just to be rejected for
Lately, I did my phone screen interview with a Karat engineer. Interview is over call over Karat website and coding is on the Karat Studio where there is an option to...
Experience: 5 years [India (4), USA (1)] Education: Masters, Top tier University Total Interview duration: 2 months (from application to rejection email) Applied online in the month of September on their careers...
Palantir | SWE Intern | London | May 2018
Current Status: Undergraduate Student, Bachelor\'s in Computer Science and Engineering. Postion: Software Engineering Intern @ Palantir, London. Location: London, UK. I came to know about the opening from their careers page and applied...
I'm posting this on glassdoor but just wanted to share this here as well, for others that may be considering applying to Palantir. **1 - Online Coding Challenge** I submitted my resume via employee re
Palantir Technologies Interview | Set 1
The interview was scheduled after I passed the coding challenge. The coding challenge was kinda simple, it was a grid, with each cell connected to its neighbors with some ...
LeetCode #3006: Find Beautiful Indices in the Given Array I. Difficulty: Medium. Topics: Two Pointers, String, Binary Search, Rolling Hash, String Matching, Hash Function. Asked at Palantir in the last 6 months.
#443 String Compression
LeetCode #443: String Compression. Difficulty: Medium. Topics: Two Pointers, String. Asked at Palantir in the last 6 months.
LeetCode #244: Shortest Word Distance II. Difficulty: Medium. Topics: Array, Hash Table, Two Pointers, String, Design. Asked at Palantir in the last 6 months.
LeetCode #1202: Smallest String With Swaps. Difficulty: Medium. Topics: Array, Hash Table, String, Depth-First Search, Breadth-First Search, Union-Find, Sorting. Asked at Palantir in the last 6 months.
What Palantir Looks for in Software Engineer Interviews
Palantir Software Engineer interviews are calibrated against the level and scope expected of the role. Across 29+ verified candidate reports on LeakCode, the consistent signals interviewers look for: clear problem decomposition before coding, explicit complexity reasoning, structured handling of edge cases, and the ability to articulate trade-offs between two reasonable approaches.
The discriminator between candidates who advance and candidates who do not is rarely the final correctness of the solution. It is the path to the solution: did you ask clarifying questions, did you state your approach before coding, did you handle edge cases without prompting, and did you communicate your reasoning throughout. Reports tagged "no hire" frequently cite a working solution with poor communication; reports tagged "strong hire" cite clear thinking even when the final solution was incomplete.
How To Use This Question Set
Real interview reports are a calibration tool, not a memorization target. Companies update their question pools every 2-4 months; memorizing exact problems risks misleading you when the interviewer uses a variant. The high-leverage use: identify the patterns that appear repeatedly in Palantir Software Engineer reports, practice those patterns on similar (not identical) problems, and use the reports to understand the interviewer's typical follow-up depth.
Filter the questions below by round type, difficulty, and recency. Focus first on reports from the past 6-12 months; older reports may reference questions that have since rotated out of Palantir's pool. Reports tagged with quantified difficulty (e.g., "medium-hard") are higher-signal than reports without difficulty tags.
Round-by-Round Expectations
Palantir Software Engineer loops typically span 4-6 rounds across phone screens and on-site or virtual on-site interviews. The structure varies by company: some run 1 recruiter screen + 1 technical phone + 3-4 on-site rounds; others run 1 recruiter screen + 1 OA + 4-5 on-site rounds. The recruiter screen is logistics and culture-light; the technical phone screen is medium-difficulty coding; the on-site loop covers coding, system design (at L4+ levels), and behavioral rounds.
Each round is designed to surface a specific signal. Coding rounds: correctness, code quality, complexity reasoning, communication. System design rounds: requirements clarification, design judgment, operational thinking. Behavioral rounds: ownership scope, leadership, ambiguity tolerance, conflict navigation. Strong candidates explicitly hit each signal dimension out loud during the round; weak candidates focus only on solving the prompt.
Common Interview Mistakes At This Combination
Reports tagged "no hire" at Palantir Software Engineer commonly cite: jumping into code without clarifying requirements, coding silently for 10+ minutes without verbalizing approach, missing edge cases (empty input, single element, very large input, overflow), and producing a working solution that the candidate cannot explain or refactor when probed. Strong candidates avoid these patterns by following a consistent template: clarify, verbalize approach, code with narration, test with examples.
Behavioral and design rounds have their own failure modes. Behavioral: stories that use "we" instead of "I" diluting individual signal, stories with no quantified outcome, defensiveness when probed about failure. Design: not asking clarifying questions, not stating requirements out loud, designing for a single server when the prompt clearly implies scale, ignoring operational concerns (deployment, monitoring, rollback). These show up in roughly half of Palantir Software Engineer interview retrospectives on LeakCode.
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