I met an early employee of Palantir at a conference and he put me into the recruiting system. We did a phone interview, and then scheduled an in person interview. They paid for my travel to attend a four hour interview process. Others have described the process as being a cattle call, and I found that to be an apt and accurate description. The interview process was a big production but in the end didn't have much substance. They flew me all the way over there, and then didn't seem to actually have any real questions to ask me once I was there. This is a problem that I have run into interviewing as a senior statistician. They want to give a hard technical interview, but don't seem to know what questions to ask someone like me. Even though they ended each interview chunk with a 'do you have any questions' moment, the interviewers were so clearly rushed and frazzled I didn't really feel like questions were all that welcome. The whole process felt more like applying for grad school at Stanford than applying for an actual job. They seemed more concerned with assessing if I was a 'winner' (with all of the implied superficiality and vagueness) than whether or not I would be a good addition to their team. This was kind of sad too, because everyone I talked to was soooo tired. They really seemed like they could use some help. Even though everyone tried really hard to be nice, and they were quite generous with my travel accommodations, the overall process was pretty demoralizing. I left feeling judged but not really measured. That seems to be the Silicon Valley culture these days.

The interview process consisted of an initial recruiter screening followed by a technical interview with an engineer. The technical round focused primarily on LeetCode-style coding questions and problem-solving. The recruiter was responsive and the interview process was straightforward.