Forward Deployed Software Engineer, New Grad

About this job

Job type: Full-time
Industry: Computer Software, Data & Analytics
Company size: 1k–5k people
Company type: Private

Technologies

java, groovy, grails, gradle

Job description

A World-Changing Company

At Palantir, we’re passionate about building software that solves problems. We partner with the most important institutions in the world to transform how they use data and technology. Our software has been used to stop terrorist attacks, discover new medicines, gain an edge in global financial markets, and more. If these types of projects excite you, we'd love for you to join us.

The Role

Forward Deployed Software Engineers (FDSEs) build creative technical solutions to our customers' hardest problems. Organizations often come to us with nebulous questions, like “Why has our assembly line slowed down?” or “How can we find money launderers financing terrorism?” FDSEs lead the process of finding answers.

As an FDSE, you'll be part of a small team of fellow FDSEs and Deployment Strategists supporting a single customer in the government or commercial space. Like at a startup, you'll make decisions about how to take on the challenges your customer poses, from the nature of the data to the user population to the legacy system environment. You'll have a large company behind you — namely, software built and maintained by hundreds of Software Engineers who build scalable, reliable platforms for you to customize and extend.

You'll start by unpacking a problem and learning about the customer's data, then move to high-level system design and prototyping. Then you're ready to deploy Palantir software, develop custom applications, and integrate the data. Along the way, you'll collaborate with technical and non-technical individuals - from Palantir and from our customers - to define and achieve goals. You'll iterate with customer users and stakeholders on a rapid cadence. You'll also work with Palantir's Product Development team on the roadmaps for our core products.

With Palantir products as your baseline, you will leverage any technology you need to drive impact. It doesn't matter what languages you know when you join us, but it does matter that you can pick new languages up quickly. We often face entirely novel problems, so solving them may require expanding your skillset. For example, we currently use:

• A variety of languages, including Java and Go for back end and Typescript for front end
• Open-source technologies like Cassandra, Spark, ElasticSearch, React, and Redux
• Industry-standard build tooling, including Gradle, Webpack, and Github

And if what you need doesn't exist yet? Go build it.

A career as an FDSE is an opportunity to gain rare insight into the world's most important institutions and industries, and to grow more quickly than you imagined you could. As you rotate among teams, you'll dive deep into domains such as intelligence, energy, health, finance, and law enforcement. You'll learn from experts in these fields about their problems and the tradeoffs they must consider in order to solve them. Questions that seem simple from the outside will quickly become complex as you consider the nuances and consequences of every possible answer. 

Technologies We Use

• Core Palantir products provide the foundations for our deployments
• Custom applications built on top of core Palantir platforms
• Postgres, Cassandra, Hadoop, and Spark for distributed data storage and parallel computing
• Java and Groovy for our back-end applications and data integration tools
• Typescript, React, Leaflet, and d3 for our web technologies
• Python for data processing and analysis
• Palantir cloud infrastructure based on AWS EC2 and S3

Our Principles

• Impact: We take on meaningful and challenging projects that change the world for the better.
• Dedication: We see projects through from beginning to end in spite of obstacles we may encounter.
• Collaboration: We work internally with people from a variety of backgrounds — such as other FDSEs, product teams, and Deployment Strategists. We also work externally with our customers, often on site, to understand and solve their problems.
• Trust: We trust each other to effectively manage time and priorities—we don't micromanage. We want to give people the space to think for themselves.
• Growth: We push ourselves and our peers to improve themselves and the world around them.
• Learning: We often face entirely novel problems, where we need to pick up a lot of new information and learn how to use it to make progress.

What We Value

• Strong engineering background, preferred in fields such as Computer Science, Mathematics, Software Engineering, Physics
• Familiarity with data structures, storage systems, cloud infrastructure, front-end frameworks, and other technical tools
• Proficiency with programming languages such as Java, C++, Python, JavaScript, or similar languages
• Ability to collaborate and empathize with a variety of individuals. You can iterate with users and non-technical stakeholders and understand how your technical decisions impact them
• Demonstrated ability to learn and work independently and make decisions with minimal supervision
• Willingness and interest to travel as needed

Requirements

• Security clearance or the ability to obtain a clearance

If you need assistance or an accommodation due to a disability, you may contact us at [email protected].