Palantir

Forward Deployed Software Engineer Interview Experience

March 1, 2023

Negative ExperienceNo Offer

Process

Initial HackerRank coding assessment
Recruiter screening
Technical interview
3-hour technical interview
Hiring manager interview

Rejected after the hiring manager interview despite strong interviews throughout the process. The process took over 6 months due to a hiring freeze/slowdown. The recruiter was not very helpful and was extremely slow to respond. This was extremely unprofessional given the long process and unexpected results.

Questions

LeetCode Mediums and System Design

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Interview Statistics

The following metrics were computed from 139 interview experiences for the Palantir Forward Deployed Software Engineer role in United States.

Success Rate

11%

Pass Rate

Palantir's interview process for their Forward Deployed Software Engineer roles in the United States is extremely selective, failing the vast majority of engineers.

Experience Rating

Positive48%

Neutral30%

Negative22%

Candidates reported having very good feelings for Palantir's Forward Deployed Software Engineer interview process in United States.

Palantir Work Experiences

Fast-paced and lots of exposure, but long hours and a sink-or-swim culture

Forward Deployed Software Engineer • Current Employee

London, England, United Kingdom

September 10, 2025

Pros: A very agile and action-oriented environment. FDEs are encouraged to find a need in the project and develop their own slice of it. Resourcing responds to this by moving you to other projects that can best make use of the spike you've demonstrated in the process. You can quickly build on Foundry. Tackling technical problems at a high level means you get a huge amount of exposure to different problem spaces.

Cons: It can be a very sink or swim environment. It's also not as technical as your usual software engineering roles, as you're generally building on top of Foundry, which is already a well-built-out platform. Depending on your project, you can be frequently working long hours.

Fast-paced and lots of exposure, but long hours and a sink-or-swim culture

Forward Deployed Software Engineer • Current Employee

London, England, United Kingdom

September 10, 2025

Pros: A very agile and action-oriented environment. FDEs are encouraged to find a need in the project and develop their own slice of it. Resourcing responds to this by moving you to other projects that can best make use of the spike you've demonstrated in the process. You can quickly build on Foundry. Tackling technical problems at a high level means you get a huge amount of exposure to different problem spaces.

Cons: It can be a very sink or swim environment. It's also not as technical as your usual software engineering roles, as you're generally building on top of Foundry, which is already a well-built-out platform. Depending on your project, you can be frequently working long hours.

Great place to work

Forward Deployed Software Engineer • Current Employee

London, England, United Kingdom

Pros: High impact, high opportunity for growth, talented colleagues.

Cons: Can be chaotic at times.

Great place to work

Forward Deployed Software Engineer • Current Employee

London, England, United Kingdom

Pros: High impact, high opportunity for growth, talented colleagues.

Cons: Can be chaotic at times.

Interesting Work, Growing Pains

Forward Deployed Software Engineer • Former Employee

Palo Alto, California, United States

Pros: They deal with some very interesting problems.

Cons: Management is going through growing pains and doesn't know how to allocate work properly. Sometimes it seemed fairly haphazard in organizing. Pressure to work a ton.

Interesting Work, Growing Pains

Forward Deployed Software Engineer • Former Employee

Palo Alto, California, United States

Pros: They deal with some very interesting problems.

Cons: Management is going through growing pains and doesn't know how to allocate work properly. Sometimes it seemed fairly haphazard in organizing. Pressure to work a ton.

Fast-paced and lots of exposure, but long hours and a sink-or-swim culture

Forward Deployed Software Engineer • Current Employee

London, England, United Kingdom

September 10, 2025

Pros: A very agile and action-oriented environment. FDEs are encouraged to find a need in the project and develop their own slice of it. Resourcing responds to this by moving you to other projects that can best make use of the spike you've demonstrated in the process. You can quickly build on Foundry. Tackling technical problems at a high level means you get a huge amount of exposure to different problem spaces.

Cons: It can be a very sink or swim environment. It's also not as technical as your usual software engineering roles, as you're generally building on top of Foundry, which is already a well-built-out platform. Depending on your project, you can be frequently working long hours.

4.0
Fast-paced and lots of exposure, but long hours and a sink-or-swim culture
Forward Deployed Software Engineer • Current Employee
London, England, United Kingdom
September 10, 2025
Pros: A very agile and action-oriented environment. FDEs are encouraged to find a need in the project and develop their own slice of it. Resourcing responds to this by moving you to other projects that can best make use of the spike you've demonstrated in the process. You can quickly build on Foundry. Tackling technical problems at a high level means you get a huge amount of exposure to different problem spaces.
Cons: It can be a very sink or swim environment. It's also not as technical as your usual software engineering roles, as you're generally building on top of Foundry, which is already a well-built-out platform. Depending on your project, you can be frequently working long hours.

Great place to work

Forward Deployed Software Engineer • Current Employee

London, England, United Kingdom

Pros: High impact, high opportunity for growth, talented colleagues.

Cons: Can be chaotic at times.

4.0
Great place to work
Forward Deployed Software Engineer • Current Employee
London, England, United Kingdom
July 28, 2025
Pros: High impact, high opportunity for growth, talented colleagues.
Cons: Can be chaotic at times.

Interesting Work, Growing Pains

Forward Deployed Software Engineer • Former Employee

Palo Alto, California, United States

Pros: They deal with some very interesting problems.

Cons: Management is going through growing pains and doesn't know how to allocate work properly. Sometimes it seemed fairly haphazard in organizing. Pressure to work a ton.

4.0
Interesting Work, Growing Pains
Forward Deployed Software Engineer • Former Employee
Palo Alto, California, United States
March 15, 2014
Pros: They deal with some very interesting problems.
Cons: Management is going through growing pains and doesn't know how to allocate work properly. Sometimes it seemed fairly haphazard in organizing. Pressure to work a ton.

Palantir Interview Questions

Find Beautiful Indices in the Given Array I

Given a string and two substrings, find the indices where the first substring occurs. Then, find the indices where the second substring occurs. Return the indices of the first substring that are close to any index of the second substring, within a specified range.

ArraysStringsTwo Pointers

Smallest String With Swaps

You're given a string and a list of index pairs. You can swap characters at these indices any number of times. Find the lexicographically smallest string you can obtain after performing these swaps.

ArraysStringsGraphsGreedy Algorithms

Find Beautiful Indices in the Given Array II

You're given a string and two patterns. Find all 'beautiful' indices where an occurrence of the first pattern is within 'k' distance of an occurrence of the second pattern.

ArraysStringsTwo Pointers

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