I applied through a staffing agency. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Palantir Technologies (London, England) in Feb 2014
Interview
First I had a screening call with the recruitment agency, that involved a couple of puzzle questions.
A few days later I had a 40-min call with a Deployment Strategist at the London office, and then 3 on site interviews.
All interviews with the Palantir staff were quite pleasant.
The purpose of the phone interview was to test if you understand the company mission and type of projects they work on. So google for all the latest articles on Palantir's work.
During the onsite interviews, they'll be interested in your personality as much as your problem solving skills. Since the job involves dealing with non-technical executives, they will ask you to expand on a few technical topics (preferably from your past work) as if you are talking to a layman.
There were also a few problem-solving questions.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Unexpected: What is the most interesting thing about you that is not on your CV?
I interviewed at Palantir Technologies (New York, NY)
Interview
They really want to get to know you throughout the process, and see how you think about data in different ways and how you solve problems. You have to build a product which takes a long time.
Started with a quick review of my recent experiences and behavioral questions, and then jumped into a SQL interview. It was mostly a large code file which had a lot of bugs in it that had to be fixed.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
They asked my about a recent project I worked on at my recent experience and then asked follow up questions about implementation decisions for the project.
I interviewed at Palantir Technologies (New York, NY)
Interview
There were 3 stages:
1. Chat with a currently deployment strategist (20 min)
2. Onsite interview: consisted of a 45 minute technical comprehension portion and a 45 minute decomposition portion
3. Interview with hiring manager (30-60 min)
After passing a round, they were very quick to get back to me, usually same day or end of the next business day.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
What is work you have done that you are very proud of?