I applied through a recruiter. The process took 5 weeks. I interviewed at Palantir Technologies (New York, NY) in Jul 2015
Interview
There is a non technical phone screen, followed by a technical phone interview. The coding is pretty minimum. They asked me to code a binary search. After that, there is an take-home exercise, which is pretty trivial in my case. (I used a simple random forest, which is available in 'sklearn’). They flew for an onsite interview, which includes three rounds of open ended questions. I bombed this one. In retrospect, I should have prepared for open ended questions. It is difficult to make up things on the fly.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
What you kind of question you want to solve if you have all the data you need, what is your exact plan, etc.
I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Palantir Technologies in Aug 2015
Interview
I applied online and got a response maybe 1.5 weeks later. Scheduled an initial phone screen with recruiter who asked about my background and "why Palantir?". A week later had a technical phone interview with a Product Expert. He asked a conceptual question, a simple coding questions (on CodePair) and, again, "why Palantir?".
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
Conceptual: Given credit card transaction data in which compromised cards are flagged, how would you the identify the most likely sources (merchants) of credit card breach?
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Palantir Technologies (Toronto, ON) in May 2015
Interview
I had three different rounds of interviews. Got bounced after the third one.
The first round is just an HR interview. Just to make sure that you can speak ok with other humans. You get asked about your background and why you want to work at Palantir - EVERYONE asks you why you want to work at Palantir. There is one very easy 'technical' question you get asked.
The second round was an (easy) software engineering interview. You go to coderpad and code up some solutions to some math algorithms. Think number of primes between 1 and n. There was also a 'if you had infinite resources, what data science problem would you want to work on and how would you approach it?' Kind of a very broad case study.
The third round was similar to the second round. No coding but I did get asked some probability questions. Expected winnings of coin flips kind of thing. Also another case study question: you are in charge of digital subscriptions for the New York Times. How would you help improve revenue? Very broad but segues into some modelling questions.
I didn't really enjoy the interview process. This could be sour grapes of course but I found the people I was interacting with fairly cold and brusque. There was absolutely no personal connection or friendly vibe in any of the technical interviews. The HR person being the exception. It just felt like the people who were interviewing me did not really have time for me and were not particularly interested in what I had to say.
Also, no detailed feedback. Just a form rejection email when I didn't move on. I emailed to ask for real feedback but was told that they don't do that. I went through three interviews with your company. I feel like you owe me some real feedback. Even to say I'm not skilled enough in these areas. I found that unprofessional.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Q: Code a function that checks if a number n is prime
Q: http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/179534/the-expected-payoff-of-a-dice-game
(I was only asked to do this for 2 rolls)
