Just finished the Palantir EM interview loop for a deploy team in NYC. Going to write this up while it's fresh because I couldn't find much signal when I was prepping.
The loop was five rounds: a recruiter screen, a technical coding round, a hiring manager conversation, a cross-functional leadership round, and a final values-fit conversation with a senior director. They called it five but really the values round bleeds into everything.
The coding round surprised me. I expected to mostly talk architecture and people management, but the first technical round was actual implementation. Not crazy LeetCode hard, but you're writing working code. One problem was graph traversal, another was a design question about caching a geospatial data feed. For an EM role that was unexpected. Be ready to code, not just whiteboard.
The leadership round is very situation-heavy. Not generic STAR like "tell me about a conflict." They asked about a specific time I had to kill a project a team was emotionally invested in. Another was about managing an engineer whose work was technically fine but whose communication was tanking the team. They want details: what you said, when, what actually changed. Vague answers don't land.
Mission alignment is not performative. Palantir is genuinely selective about whether you can engage with the defense/government work. I don't mean they quiz you on US foreign policy. But they will ask how you think about working on software used in high-stakes environments. Have a considered answer, because if you say something dismissive they will notice.
Leveling: I was interviewing for what they described as an EM-2 equivalent, leading 8-10 engineers across two squads. Total comp discussed was in the 380-430k range for NYC depending on stock refresh schedule. That's current as of Q2 2026.
Timeline was about 4 weeks start to finish. Recruiter was responsive. Final feedback was specific enough to be useful whether I got an offer or not.
Happy to answer questions about the loop format.