What rounds did Palantir candidates report in 2025?

A HackerRank online assessment, a behavioral phone screen with an engineer, a LeetCode-style technical interview, back-to-back decomposition and learning interviews, and a hiring manager interview. Forward deployed candidates sometimes had coding and decomp combined in one earlier interview.

Where do candidates fail the Palantir interview?

In 2025 reports, mostly in the later rounds. A November 2025 forward deployed candidate failed the learning interview after being asked to write SQL without running it, an October 2025 forward deployed candidate found decomp very abstract and got no offer, and a July 2025 new grad stopped at the OA after partly solving one of three questions.

How fast does the Palantir process move?

A July 2025 new grad was contacted five days after applying and given five days to finish the OA. An October 2025 intern candidate said the process moved fast and interviewers were engaged. One November 2025 candidate said the recruiter stopped responding after the onsite.

Palantir Interview Experience 2026

Palantir candidates in 2025 describe a HackerRank online assessment, a behavioral phone screen with an engineer, a LeetCode-style coding interview, then a decomposition interview and a learning interview back to back, and a final hiring manager interview. Decomp asked for a high-level design of an open problem such as an employee communication platform, and learning ranged from debugging to writing SQL queries without running them. None of the six 2025 reports below ended in an offer; most candidates stopped at decomp, learning or the step before the final round.

Palantir interview process round by round

Round	Duration	What it tests
Online assessment	Several days to complete	HackerRank: LeetCode easy and hard, plus a REST API question
Engineer phone screen	Not reported	Behavioral: what excites you about Palantir
Technical interview	~45-60 min	LeetCode-style, often class or data structure design
Decomposition	~45-60 min	Open-ended system design with no code
Learning	~45-60 min	Debugging or SQL taught or shown in the round
Hiring manager	~30-60 min	Motivation, past work, weak spots

Palantir interview process in 2025: reports by role

These come from self-reported 2025 write-ups on Taro (jointaro.com). Each is one candidate’s account.

Software engineer new grad, US (July 2025, no offer). Palantir reached out five days after the application with a HackerRank challenge and five days to finish it: one LeetCode easy, one LeetCode hard and one RESTful API question. The candidate fully solved two and partly solved the third, and did not advance.
Software engineer, Palo Alto (September 2025, no offer). HackerRank OA, an entirely behavioral phone screen with an engineer (“What about Palantir excites you?”), a LeetCode-style technical with another engineer, then back-to-back learning and decomp interviews. The candidate did not reach the final round but praised the recruiters.
Software engineer intern, US (October 2025, no offer). HackerRank, a DSA round on class design with linked lists, a virtual superday of decomp and learning, and a hiring manager interview that the candidate said could be anything and usually targets the weakest earlier round. The process moved fast.
Forward deployed software engineer, US (October 2025, no offer). The learning interview felt doable and the candidate answered everything; the decomp interview was very abstract with no direction. Asked why they were interested in the role.
Forward deployed software engineer, New York (November 2025, no offer). A technical round in two parts: a strategy exercise to build a platform for employee communication, and a medium coding question. The candidate said the process tests thought process and basic to moderate coding.
Forward deployed software engineer, US (November 2025, no offer). Recruiter screen, a combined coding and decomp interview (simple coding plus a high-level design), then a virtual onsite of another decomp and a learning interview. Told no preparation was needed for learning, the candidate had to write specific SQL queries with no way to run them, failed that round, and then heard nothing from the recruiter.

Detailed interview experiences

Experience 1: Forward deployed software engineer, US (November 2025)

Recruiter screen: Why do you want to work here?

Coding and decomp interview: A simple coding question followed by a high-level system design.

Onsite, decomp: A second high-level design exercise.

Onsite, learning: Expected to write specific SQL queries without a runtime, even though the candidate had been told no preparation was needed.

Result: Rejected after the onsite; the recruiter stopped responding.

Takeaways

What decided it: SQL fluency on paper in the learning round.
Common fail: Trusting “no prep needed.” Brush up on joins, group by and window functions even if your background is AI or systems.
How to practice: Write ten queries on paper against a schema you have never seen, then run them to check.

Experience 2: Software engineer, Palo Alto (September 2025)

OA: HackerRank, details not shared.

Phone screen with an engineer: Fully behavioral, centered on what about Palantir excites the candidate.

Technical interview: LeetCode-style with another engineer.

Superday: Learning and decomp back to back.

Result: No offer before the final round.

Takeaways

What decided it: The decomp and learning pair, not the coding.
How to practice: Run decomp and learning mocks in one sitting so the second one is done tired, as in the real superday.

Experience 3: Software engineer intern, US (October 2025)

HackerRank, then DSA: class design with linked lists.

Virtual superday: Decomp and learning.

Hiring manager: Open-ended; the candidate’s view was that it tends to probe the weakest of the earlier three interviews.

Result: No offer, positive experience.

Takeaway: Write down after each round what went worst, and prepare a better answer for it before the hiring manager interview.

Experience 4: Forward deployed software engineer, New York (November 2025)

Technical round: Part one, build a platform for employee communication, framed as a strategy exercise. Part two, a medium coding question.

Result: No offer.

Takeaway: For decomp prompts like this, start with users and goals (who sends what to whom, how urgent, on what devices) before naming services.

Experience 5: New grad, US (July 2025)

OA: Three questions, LeetCode easy, LeetCode hard, and a RESTful API task, with five days to complete after the invite.

Result: Two fully correct and one partial; no further rounds.

Takeaway: Practice API pagination and JSON processing in HackerRank’s editor, since that task is less familiar than algorithm problems.

Palantir interview questions that come up often

Coding and OA

A LeetCode easy and a LeetCode hard on HackerRank
A RESTful API question: fetch and process paginated results
Class design with linked lists
A medium coding question in the forward deployed technical round

Decomp

Build a platform for employee communication
A high-level system design of an open problem
Taxi dispatch, hospital room assignment or disaster resource allocation (prep guide examples)

Learning

Debugging unfamiliar code
Writing SQL queries without running them

Behavioral and hiring manager

Why do you want to work here?
What about Palantir excites you?
Why are you interested in this role?

Palantir interview tips from these candidates

Do not skip SQL. The learning round can turn into query writing on paper.
In decomp, ask questions until the goal is clear, then lead. Interviewers may give no direction.
Treat the hiring manager round as a technical and motivation check, not a chat.
Practice the REST API style of OA question, not only algorithms.

Palantir behavioral round in these reports

The engineer phone screen in the September 2025 Palo Alto loop was entirely behavioral, and every forward deployed report listed a version of “Why do you want to work here?” The hiring manager round closes the loop. Sample answers are on the Palantir behavioral interview questions page, and round-by-round prep is on the Palantir interview questions hub.

Sample answers for high-frequency questions

Q. Decomp: build a platform for employee communication.
A. Clarify users (all staff, managers, frontline workers without desks), message types (announcements, team chat, urgent alerts) and constraints (mobile, offline, compliance retention). Model users, groups, channels and messages. Propose a service that stores messages per channel, pushes over WebSockets or mobile push, and keeps an audit log. Cover urgent alerts that must be acknowledged, retention rules, and how you would roll it out to one site first.

Q. SQL: for each customer, return their most recent order.
A. Use ROW_NUMBER() OVER (PARTITION BY customer_id ORDER BY created_at DESC) in a subquery, then keep rows where the row number equals 1. Mention ties: if two orders share a timestamp, add order_id to the ORDER BY so the result is stable.

Q. Paginate through a REST API.
A. Request a page, process it, and repeat while a next cursor exists. Retry 429 and 5xx with backoff, stop on an empty page, and guard against a cursor that never advances.

Palantir interview tips from these reports

Online assessment

A July 2025 new grad had five days to finish a HackerRank OA with an easy, a hard and a REST API question.
Two of three fully solved was not enough to advance in that report.

Decomp and learning

Decomp prompts are open and interviewers may give no direction.
Learning can be debugging or SQL written without running it.

Hiring manager

Often probes the weakest earlier round.
Expect detailed questions on motivation and past projects.

Sources

Similar companies

OpenAI · SpaceX · Tesla · TikTok · D. E. Shaw · Bloomberg · Google