Prepare for your Palantir engineering interview

System design and software engineering rounds calibrated to Palantir’s mission-driven, data-at-scale engineering culture.

Socratify AI

The Interview

What Palantir is looking for

System Design Interview

Large-Scale System Design

01Data Pipeline Architecture at Petabyte Scale

02Distributed Query Execution & Optimization

03Fault Tolerance & Exactly-Once Semantics

04Latency Budget Decomposition

Coding Interview

Software Engineering Round

01Algorithm Design & Complexity Analysis

02Data Structure Selection & Trade-offs

03Production-Quality Code & Edge Cases

04Debugging & Root Cause Analysis

Values Interview

Palantir Mission & Culture

01Mission-Driven Decision Making

02Ownership & Accountability

03Working in Ambiguity

04Cross-Functional Impact

Petabyte-scale data pipelines//Mission-first engineering culture//Rigorous system design bar

Practice Library

Palantir exercises

Ready to ace your Palantir engineering interview?

Prepare for your Palantir engineering interview

System design and software engineering rounds calibrated to Palantir’s mission-driven, data-at-scale engineering culture.

Socratify AI

The Interview

What Palantir is looking for

System Design Interview

Large-Scale System Design

01Data Pipeline Architecture at Petabyte Scale

02Distributed Query Execution & Optimization

03Fault Tolerance & Exactly-Once Semantics

04Latency Budget Decomposition

Coding Interview

Software Engineering Round

01Algorithm Design & Complexity Analysis

02Data Structure Selection & Trade-offs

03Production-Quality Code & Edge Cases

04Debugging & Root Cause Analysis

Values Interview

Palantir Mission & Culture

01Mission-Driven Decision Making

02Ownership & Accountability

03Working in Ambiguity

04Cross-Functional Impact

Petabyte-scale data pipelines//Mission-first engineering culture//Rigorous system design bar

How It Works

Master Palantir Engineering Interviews

System design and coding rounds, scored on Palantir’s data architecture and engineering depth dimensions. · Click to expand

1Your Engineering Goals

System Design

Practitioner

Production Incident Diagnosis

Practitioner

2Engineering Case Prep

Design a petabyte-scale data integration pipeline for Palantir Foundry that ingests...

CASE INTERVIEWHard

Palantir

3Frameworks

Framework

Are availability losses (unplanned downtime) the primary driver?

Is equipment failure rate increasing on critical stations?

Servo drive on Station 7 failing twice per shift; MTBF down from 420h to 48h

Lubrication PM cycle missed for 3 consecutive weeks — maintenance log gap

Is changeover and setup time increasing?

Average changeover time up from 18 min to 41 min after operator rotation 4 weeks ago

Standard work instructions not updated for new SKU mix introduced last quarter

Are performance losses (speed below rated) contributing?

Is the line running below rated throughput speed?

Line speed throttled to 73% of rated after maintenance flag on conveyor tension sensor

Sensor last calibrated 11 weeks ago — maintenance schedule specifies 8-week cycle

Are quality losses (defects and rework) a significant factor?

Is first-pass yield declining on finished assemblies?

FPY down from 98.2% to 91.4% — three defect types now dominating scrap stream

SPC charts on torque wrench station showing process drift — tooling wear check outstanding?

4Feedback

System Design

Distinctive

Scalability & Capacity Planning

Strong

Incident Diagnosis

Meeting Bar

Engineering Communication

Strong

Repeat

Practice Library

Palantir exercises

Design a data pipeline that ingests 500 TB/day of heterogeneous sensor data and makes it...

CASE INTERVIEWHard

Defence / Data Analytics · System DesignPalantir

Your Palantir Foundry pipeline is producing stale data: objects in the graph are 4 hours...

LEARNHard

Defence / Data Analytics · Distributed Systems DebuggingPalantir

Design a distributed graph query system that traverses billion-node entity relationship...

LEARNHard

Defence / Data Analytics · Graph Database DesignPalantir

Tell me about a time you had to deliver a complex engineering project under significant...

BEHAVIORALMedium

Behavioral · Ambiguity & OwnershipPalantir

Describe a situation where you identified a critical production risk that others had...

BEHAVIORALMedium

Behavioral · Risk OwnershipPalantir