The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Palantir Technologies
Interview
Palantir's interview process is incredibly long and inefficient. It took 8 weeks from when I was first contacted by their recruiting coordinator, including 4 phone calls, two last minute reschedules, a take home 'assignment', and a cross country flight on less than 24 hours notice just to get a rejection. Around week 5, I spent many hours working on the take home 'assignment', and on week 6 I talked to someone about it for maybe 15 minutes. That engineer didn't even understand the data that they had given for the assignment. I think their inefficiency in interviewing is due to the lack of structure in the company: instead of meeting a couple of people at the level of the position and a couple of managers, you meet 8 people at the level of the position and no managers. You end up dealing with a lot of people with minimum experience as interviewers, and it shows.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
- Binary search for an integer with no upper limit
- Open ended machine learning decomp. question
- Take home time-series modeling assignment
- Calculate the variance of a list of ints
- Given two random variables uniform on 0-1, create a random variable uniform on the unit circle
I applied through an employee referral. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Palantir Technologies in Oct 2015
Interview
I did a phone interview with an HR representative. The interviewer described what Palantir does, and what the products are. Then she asked me to give details about my background, focusing on why I do what I do, what skills and technologies I am familiar with,and what motivates me. Finally, she asked why I want to work at Palantir, and gave me some time to ask questions about the company.