I was first contacted by a recruiter who arranged a technical phone interview, followed by onsite interviews in London. Most of the interviewers seemed quite friendly; one of them was a bit arrogant.

Questions were not particularly difficult, definitely easier than I would expect at companies like Google or Facebook. What seemed a bit odd about Palantir is that all the interviewers and people I saw in the office were very young, pretty much all of them new grads. At other companies I interviewed with, I almost always saw some senior engineers. This made me think that perhaps most employees at Palantir leave the company soon after joining.

Anyway, after the onsite interviews, I was contacted by the recruiter and invited to the last stage, which was a Skype call. Again, I was surprised to find out that the interviewer was around 25, with only about 2 years of professional experience. Her lack of experience was quite apparent, judging by her very vague answers to my questions at the end. She seemed a bit arrogant and wasn't paying much attention to my answers.

However, I felt that the interview went quite well. I thought I answered the technical questions very well and was expecting a positive response from the company. I was very surprised to hear that they rejected me in the end.

The recruiter said that all feedback was very positive but my strengths "somehow do not match" with what they are looking for. That was really surprising. It was the first time I heard that all feedback was positive but still got rejected for some strange reason.

However, the process made me realize that Palantir probably is not a very good workplace anyway: very young, slightly arrogant, and inexperienced employees; poor employee retention; and very long working hours (both of my phone interviews were around 2-3 am in California!). Also, the FDE role doesn't seem like a good fit for someone who is looking to work as a software engineer eventually. It is more of a consulting role with long hours and a lot of meetings with clients.

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