I applied via LinkedIn and a recruiter contacted me to schedule a phone screen. The process was prompt and cordial. During the phone screen I was contacted by a young engineer, who told me a bit about Palantir (nothing I did not know already). The problem was that he was calling from a cell phone from his home. Palantir has flex timing, and he worked from after lunch till will after mid-night (12 hours). Then I was asked to solve a puzzle and then write the code. The puzzle could be mapped into a graph traversal based search algorithm with some small twists. I got the mapping right away and then was asked to code it up, using Google Docs. I wrote some notes down to describe my solution and also suggested some way to speed up the process by building the graph lazily. I am C++ guy so it simply takes longer to write everything out compared to productivity oriented languages. The interviewer was silent during the process, except telling me I am running out of time or asking me where I had declared a particular variable. At that point I simple wrote down the few remaining steps in English. Later that afternoon I emailed the recruiter with the final solution (added 20-30 lines); the total code was about 170 lines. A few days later I got an email saying they do not have a match for me. Given the nature of the interview, I think it would have been better if they use interviewstreet or some other online coding site. That way they can describe the problem properly and not worry about bad cell phone reception, or the interviewer's inability to communicate well since he just woke up or is not too interested. It also will prepare the candidate for what to expect. And since speed-coding is what they are looking for (the interviewer mentioned that Palantir hires people who can program at 10x the average programmer), an IDE is much better environment to write code than a Google Doc with no indentation, coloring or auto-correct.

I got this call from a recruiter about the position. An interview date was scheduled, the interviewer was very formal and asked lots of questions about the role. Most of the questions were technical but I'm sure cleared all the questions. A brain teaser game was also played which was fun. Three days later, the recruiter called me that I wasn't selected because I lack communication skills which I felt bad about.