I applied for the Internship Program, presenting myself as a Front-End Developer, via the Career section on Palantir's website in January 2014. After a week, they replied with a coding challenge. It consisted of one quite simple problem with a time limit of 100 minutes. I felt confident after taking this challenge, and after 3 days, they offered a phone screen. I was in the middle of my finals, so I asked for a two-week extension, and there was no problem with scheduling; the recruiter was really nice and replied within minutes.

The phone screen was led by an engineer. Unfortunately, in the first seconds, the first problem appeared: the voice quality was horrible. Since I am from Europe, that's probably the reason. If you are from Europe, try to ask for other possibilities like VoIP or Skype.

In the first part, the engineer described his position (he was also a Front-End Developer, so they probably matched it with my preferences). Then he started with a set of problems. They were really easy, like finding duplicates in an array of integers. I "screwed up" one variation of this problem (finding duplicates only within k sequential indices). In the end, I had time for two questions. Overall, the engineer was really nice, trying to give me some hints, etc. The whole interview lasted 45 minutes.

Well, I didn't do well, so after 3 days, I received a declining email.

To sum up, there was really no problem with communication. But since Palantir hires the best of the best, once you fail a bit, you are out of the hiring process, so be prepared!

Not really hard ones. As I mentioned, finding duplicates in an array of integers and variations of this problem. But it was only the first phone screen; I should have expected more difficulty in later stages.