Palantir · Primly Community

Palantir frontend engineer interview: what the rounds look like in 2026

remote_swe_42 · 5 replies

Finished the Palantir frontend SWE loop a few weeks ago for a role on one of their Foundry product teams. Sharing because I couldn't find anything specific to frontend when I was prepping.

Full disclosure: I did not get an offer. But the process was well-run and the feedback was actually useful, so I'm posting anyway.

The loop: recruiter screen, one Karat technical screen, then three onsite rounds (two technical, one behavioral/HM).

Technical round 1: pure coding. No frontend at all. Graphs, hash maps, standard algorithmic problems. Medium difficulty. I was honestly a bit caught off guard expecting React or DOM questions. They treat frontend SWE as SWE first. The interviewer said explicitly they don't differentiate frontend/backend in the core coding bar.

Technical round 2: more applied. This one did have frontend flavor. We worked through building a data grid component from scratch. No framework. Vanilla JS. They wanted to see how I structured state, how I thought about performance with large datasets (virtualization came up), and how I handled edge cases like empty states and loading. This was the more enjoyable round honestly.

What I got feedback on: My data structures in round 1 were fine but I didn't communicate tradeoffs proactively. When I chose an approach I explained what it did but not why I wasn't using an alternative. That's a pattern they care about apparently.

Behavioral round: Standard Palantir questions. Ambiguity, mission fit, working under pressure. The HM was sharp and the conversation felt real, not checklist-y.

Frontend stack at Palantir: From what I gathered, Foundry is TypeScript/React heavy. Blueprint.js is their internal component library and it's open source, so you can actually look at it beforehand which I recommend.

Total comp quoted for the role (senior SWE, NYC) was around 290-320k depending on refresh. I didn't make it to the offer stage so I can't confirm, but that's what the recruiter said during the pre-loop conversation.

5 replies

sec_sasha

The Blueprint.js tip is underrated. I've seen at least two people mention that looking at the Palantir open source repos before your loop gives you genuine signal about how they think about component design. It's not a cheat code but it shows up in how you frame things.

staff_steph

The "no framework, vanilla JS" round is a pretty common Palantir thing from what I've heard. They want to see that frontend engineers understand the fundamentals and aren't framework-dependent. If your mental model is entirely React hooks and you've never thought about raw DOM manipulation, that's a gap.

frontend_fran

Yeah this became obvious in the round. I knew the answer but had to consciously translate out of "React brain" which took a beat. Worth practicing that translation before the loop.

qa_quinn

Appreciating the transparency even without an offer. Did they give you the feedback unprompted or did you have to ask for it specifically?

ae_andre

This confirms what I heard: the coding bar is the same regardless of specialization. Good to have written up explicitly.