I applied through an employee referral. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Palantir Technologies (Washington, DC) in Sep 2015
Interview
0th round: Phone screen with a recruiter. Pretty straightforward and friendly. Questions about my interests, where I was in my job search, why I wanted to leave my current job. It took several weeks on their end to schedule it.
1st round: One Skype interview with a deployment strategist. For scheduling reasons I had to take it as a phone call and that was acceptable to them. 3 strengths, 3 weaknesses, specific examples of each.
2nd round: Casual lunch plus two in-person interviews, all with tenured deployment strategists. One interview was a video conference with someone from another office. One interviewer was very obviously texting under the table while I answered questions. Each interview had a fit portion with questions about my interest in Palantir, motivations, past experience, and why I was leaving my current employer. Each interview also had a couple case-types of questions and one interviewer gave me a brain teaser.
(this is as far as I made it)
3rd round: Interview with someone pretty senior, format supposed to be similar to 2nd round
Several friends told me about an unexpected 4th round interview with an individual (deployment strategist or engineer) from the specific team interested in them
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
How would you detect patterns of insider trading at professional services firm if you had access to all cell phone and email communications of its employees?
Imagine Facebook and a bank merged, giving them access to each other's data. What would you want to do with the data? How would you do it? At a very high level, how would you approach merging the data sets?
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.
I interviewed at Palantir Technologies (New York, NY)
Interview
There were 3 stages:
1. Chat with a currently deployment strategist (20 min)
2. Onsite interview: consisted of a 45 minute technical comprehension portion and a 45 minute decomposition portion
3. Interview with hiring manager (30-60 min)
After passing a round, they were very quick to get back to me, usually same day or end of the next business day.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
What is work you have done that you are very proud of?