Senior Backend Software Engineer - Infrastructure

A World-Changing Company

Palantir builds the world's leading software for data-driven decisions and operations. By bringing the right data to the people who need it, our platforms empower our partners to develop lifesaving drugs, forecast supply chain disruptions, locate missing children, and more.

The Role

Software Engineers at Palantir build software at scale to transform how organizations use data. Our Software Engineers are involved throughout the product lifecycle, from idea generation, design, prototyping, and production delivery. You will collaborate closely with technical and non-technical teammates to understand our customers' problems and build products that solve them. We encourage movement across teams to share context, skills, and experience, so you'll learn about many different technologies and aspects of each product. Engineers work autonomously and make decisions independently, within a community that will support and challenge you as you grow and develop, becoming a strong technical contributor and engineering leader.

Our Product Development organization is made up of small teams of Software Engineers. Each team focuses on a specific aspect of a product. Our infrastructure teams are responsible for the lowest layers of our software stack, often focused on database technologies, distributed systems, large scale data systems, security, and application infrastructure. As a Software Engineer on infrastructure working on our Foundry platform, you'll contribute high-quality code to underpin Palantir Foundry and Gotham with performant, secure, and scalable building blocks, enabling products deployed to the most important institutions in the public and private sector. You'll build the foundational capabilities that power our products used by research scientists, aerospace engineers, intelligence analysts, and economic forecasters, in countries around the world.

We're hiring engineers who are passionate about solving real-world problems and empowering both developers and end-users to work optimally. If you're motivated to develop reliable, performant, and scalable systems, and to design robust APIs and primitives, this role offers the opportunity to make a significant impact on our products and the people who use them.

Frontline

Foundry Software Engineers may be offered the opportunity to Frontline, an exclusive program unlike any other. This unique, short-term assignment involves being embedded with customers, allowing you to work directly with users and gain firsthand insight into how our products are used and the challenges our customers face. Unlike traditional engineering roles, Frontline immerses you in complex, ambiguous problems, empowering you to deliver impactful solutions across some of the world's most important industries and institutions.

Some of our most successful products were built on the factory floor, addressing real-world problems for the world's most important institutions. These products were developed by some of our most successful product engineers, who began their careers in roles aligned with Frontline responsibilities, gaining a deep understanding of both our technology and our customers.

Frontliners operate across a broad spectrum of responsibilities, much like a startup CTO. They work in small teams to own the end-to-end execution of high-stakes projects. This spectrum ranges from discussing architecture and building custom web apps to conducting workshops with users and strategizing with customer executives. No two days are alike, as each day is diverse and impactful. By witnessing how customers engage with Foundry and experiencing these pain points firsthand, you'll gain unique insights that feed directly back into our development process, helping to refine and enhance our products.

Core Responsibilities

  • Building a performant search and indexing ecosystem for complex granularly permissioned data
  • Contributing to open-source data processing libraries, integrating the latest innovations to achieve performance gains
  • Building the distributed systems that power large scale compute workloads, orchestrating and efficiently scheduling hundreds of thousands of containers every hour
  • Designing architecture and opinionated APIs to keep application developers on the happy path
  • Tracing and performance observability in high scale distributed microservice architectures
  • Building reliant, performant, and scalable systems for storage, auth, or asset serving to enable other product teams to build robust applications without deep domain expertise in the underlying systems
  • Automating the deployment, management, and operations of complex distributed systems like Cassandra, Elasticsearch, Kafka, and more across different environments

Technologies We Use

  • Different backend languages, including Java, Rust, and Go
  • Open-source technologies like Cassandra, ElasticSearch, Spark, Kafka, Kubernetes, Flink
  • Industry-standard build tooling, including Gradle and GitHub

What We Value

  • Demonstrated ability to collaborate and empathize with a variety of individuals. Able to iterate with users and non-technical stakeholders and understand how technical decisions impact them.
  • Ability to learn new technology and concepts, even without in-depth experience. Experience developing and managing highly-available distributed systems is beneficial, but not required.
  • Bias towards quality and thoughtful about edge cases ("anything that can go wrong will go wrong"); writes code that is defensive against all possibilities.
  • Leading solutions and APIs with users in mind while maintaining a high engineering bar. Seeks to centralize and abstract complexity away from our users in order to expose simple, powerful APIs for consumers.
  • Active US Security clearance, or eligibility and willingness to obtain a US Security clearance is beneficial, but not necessary.

What We Require

  • 6+ years of experience designing, building, and operating scalable and reliable infrastructure systems in a production environment
  • Engineering background in Computer Science, Mathematics, Software Engineering, Physics or similar field.
  • Strong coding skills with demonstrated proficiency in programming languages, such as Java, C++, Python, Rust, or similar languages.
  • Familiarity with storage and data processing systems, cloud infrastructure, and other technical tools.
  • Strong written and verbal communication skills and ability to iterate quickly with teammates, incorporating feedback and holding a high bar for quality.

Salary

The estimated salary range for this position is estimated to be $135,000 - $200,000/year. Total compensation for this position may also include Restricted Stock units, sign-on bonus and other potential future incentives. Further note that total compensation for this position will be determined by each individual's relevant qualifications, work experience, skills, and other factors. This estimate excludes the value of any potential sign-on bonus; the value of any benefits offered; and the potential future value of any long-term incentives.

Our benefits aim to promote health and wellbeing across all areas of Palantirians' lives. We work to continuously improve our offerings and listen to our community as we design and update them. The list below details our available benefits and some of the perks that can be enjoyed as an employee of Palantir Technologies.

Benefits

  • Employees (and their eligible dependents) can enroll in medical, dental, and vision insurance as well as voluntary life insurance
  • Employees are automatically covered by Palantir's basic life, AD&D and disability insurance
  • Commuter benefits
  • Relocation assistance
  • Take what you need paid time off, not accrual based
  • 2 weeks paid time off built into the end of each year (subject to team and business needs)
  • 10 paid holidays throughout the calendar year
  • Supportive leave of absence program including time off for military service and medical events
  • Paid leave for new parents and subsidized back-up care for all parents
  • Fertility and family building benefits including but not limited to adoption, surrogacy, and preservation
  • Stipend to help with expenses that come with a new child
  • Employees can enroll in Palantir's 401k plan

Life at Palantir

We want every Palantirian to achieve their best outcomes, that's why we celebrate individuals' strengths, skills, and interests, from your first interview to your longterm growth, rather than rely on traditional career ladders. Paying attention to the needs of our community enables us to optimize our opportunities to grow and helps ensure many pathways to success at Palantir. Promoting health and well-being across all areas of Palantirians' lives is just one of the ways we're investing in our community. Learn more at Life at Palantir and note that our offerings may vary by region.

In keeping consistent with Palantir's values and culture, we believe employees are "better together" and in-person work affords the opportunity for more creative outcomes. Therefore, we encourage employees to work from our offices to foster connectivity and innovation. Many teams do offer hybrid options (WFH a day or two a week), allowing our employees to strike the right trade-off for their personal productivity. Based on business need, there are a few roles that allow for "Remote" work on an exceptional basis. If you are applying for one of these roles, you must work from the state in which you are employed. If the posting is specified as Onsite, you are required to work from an office.

If you want to empower the world's most important institutions, you belong here. Palantir values excellence regardless of background. We are proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer for all, including but not limited to Veterans and those with disabilities. Palantir is committed to making the application and hiring process accessible to everyone and will provide a reasonable accommodation for those living with a disability. If you need an accommodation for the application or hiring process, please reach out and let us know how we can help.

Please note that you will never be asked to submit a payment or share financial information to participate in our interview process. If you suspect that you've been contacted by a scammer, we recommend you cease all communication with the individual and consider reporting them to the relevant authorities, such as the US FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3).

If you would like to understand more about how your personal data will be processed by Palantir, please see our Privacy Policy.

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Common Interview Questions And Answers

1. HOW DO YOU PLAN YOUR DAY?

This is what this question poses: When do you focus and start working seriously? What are the hours you work optimally? Are you a night owl? A morning bird? Remote teams can be made up of people working on different shifts and around the world, so you won't necessarily be stuck in the 9-5 schedule if it's not for you...

2. HOW DO YOU USE THE DIFFERENT COMMUNICATION TOOLS IN DIFFERENT SITUATIONS?

When you're working on a remote team, there's no way to chat in the hallway between meetings or catch up on the latest project during an office carpool. Therefore, virtual communication will be absolutely essential to get your work done...

3. WHAT IS "WORKING REMOTE" REALLY FOR YOU?

Many people want to work remotely because of the flexibility it allows. You can work anywhere and at any time of the day...

4. WHAT DO YOU NEED IN YOUR PHYSICAL WORKSPACE TO SUCCEED IN YOUR WORK?

With this question, companies are looking to see what equipment they may need to provide you with and to verify how aware you are of what remote working could mean for you physically and logistically...

5. HOW DO YOU PROCESS INFORMATION?

Several years ago, I was working in a team to plan a big event. My supervisor made us all work as a team before the big day. One of our activities has been to find out how each of us processes information...

6. HOW DO YOU MANAGE THE CALENDAR AND THE PROGRAM? WHICH APPLICATIONS / SYSTEM DO YOU USE?

Or you may receive even more specific questions, such as: What's on your calendar? Do you plan blocks of time to do certain types of work? Do you have an open calendar that everyone can see?...

7. HOW DO YOU ORGANIZE FILES, LINKS, AND TABS ON YOUR COMPUTER?

Just like your schedule, how you track files and other information is very important. After all, everything is digital!...

8. HOW TO PRIORITIZE WORK?

The day I watched Marie Forleo's film separating the important from the urgent, my life changed. Not all remote jobs start fast, but most of them are...

9. HOW DO YOU PREPARE FOR A MEETING AND PREPARE A MEETING? WHAT DO YOU SEE HAPPENING DURING THE MEETING?

Just as communication is essential when working remotely, so is organization. Because you won't have those opportunities in the elevator or a casual conversation in the lunchroom, you should take advantage of the little time you have in a video or phone conference...

10. HOW DO YOU USE TECHNOLOGY ON A DAILY BASIS, IN YOUR WORK AND FOR YOUR PLEASURE?

This is a great question because it shows your comfort level with technology, which is very important for a remote worker because you will be working with technology over time...

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