I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Palantir Technologies
Interview
Had a telephone round with an HR person and then another followup call with a Deployment Strategist based out of Palo Alto.
Was quite disappointed with the interview, having come from an analytical background the interview was pretty much strengths / weaknesses / what do you want to do in 5 years. I have a decent amount of work experience and pretty much crushed all these. Either way, the interesting thing is that from the kind of background and skills I gleaned from the interviewer, this did not really seem like an analytically challenging job. The role seems to be basically getting clients to format their data in a particular way. From reading about the company I was fully expecting a slew of brain teasers and this interview really caught me off guard. When I got the rejection email I was quite stunned. I also emailed the interviewer asking for feedback and got no reply.
After some introspection, perhaps I should have realized I would not come off as a good cultural fit when someone probably 22 years old describes the office culture as "we have like, beers after work and stuff". From the job description it sounded like the job was a good mix of analytical and business skills, and I think I deserved at least a face to face meeting given the strength of my background, but maybe I don't understand the candidate type they are looking for.
I interviewed at Palantir Technologies (New York, NY)
Interview
They really want to get to know you throughout the process, and see how you think about data in different ways and how you solve problems. You have to build a product which takes a long time.
Started with a quick review of my recent experiences and behavioral questions, and then jumped into a SQL interview. It was mostly a large code file which had a lot of bugs in it that had to be fixed.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
They asked my about a recent project I worked on at my recent experience and then asked follow up questions about implementation decisions for the project.
Initial screening call with a current Palantir employee -> onsite interview -> hiring manager interview.
Overall very friendly and great. But it was a bit chaotic and unstructured though. The onsite interview had 30 people in one room for almost 4 hours. And the interview portion was only an hour of it. If you’re out of college this is exciting and great experience, but as something with work experience, it was frustrating taking PTO to go in office to have it be a college onboarding day