I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Palantir Technologies (London, England) in Feb 2015
Interview
I was approached by a recruiter via LinkedIn. She was VERY friendly, attentive, informal yet professional. I got a far better impression of her than my interviewer in the end.
A few email exchanges/phone calls with CVs, a few motivations as well as a written response to "Why Palantir?", "What kind of data have you worked with (3Vs questions)" and a situational question and hiring software engineers and structuring recruitment teams (yeah... was pretty random).
I then had a phone interview which was paaaainful. The interviewer led it really badly, lots of strange timing resulting in peculiar silences which I then tried to fill a little (this is quite important for a phone interview). I was a little jokey and friendly at the start to break the ice/warm up (it was at 7pm - so thought he might want a little friendliness before we started), and it was just deadpan and absolutely no bounce off.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
1. Why Palantir
2. 2 strengths, 2 weaknesses
3. Name a time when (worked in teams, had problems etc etc)
4. Describe to me a complicated process
5. Classic brain-teaser problem (was given the egg an 100 storey building one - just google it)
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