This Aced (formerly Exponent) post shares a 2025 candidate's experience interviewing for Palantir's Forward Deployed Engineer role. The process had four rounds and six questions: a recruiter screen (arranged via a third-party headhunter), a technical interview, a phone interview, and a final round. The technical interview avoided rigorous LeetCode-style problems in favor of practical coding to implement specific features; the candidate advises prioritizing a working solution over an unfinished optimized one. Other candidates noted the process was well organized with collaborative interviewers, and cited time management in an unfamiliar-codebase round and learning SQL as their main challenges.

Key points

• Four rounds, six questions: recruiter screen, technical, phone, final round.
• Technical interview uses practical feature-building, not LeetCode-style problems.
• Advice: ship a working solution over an unfinished optimized one.
• Candidates found unfamiliar-codebase timing and SQL hardest.
• Interviewers were collaborative; thinking aloud helped performance.

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