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Intern at Palantir

Time at Palantir is time spent applying your knowledge against real world problems, shaping our company, and learning from those around you.

What will you build? Featured Intern Profiles


Grace Wang, Senior, Computer Science and Business, University of Pennsylvania

Forward Deployed Engineer

Grace spent her summer working out of both the Palo Alto and New York offices, where she wrote a dependency tracker for the front-end of the Palantir Metropolis platform, which would be used by one of our biggest customers. Metropolis features a dashboard where users can embed charts, graphs, and other dynamically updating widgets that present data from different documents in the system. Grace’s project created a unified change history for documents and their dependencies, which allows users to diagnose and fix any presentation problems with their dashboard.

Lesson learned: “I got the sense that my project was really high-priority. It was especially cool the last few weeks, because my app was getting in front of users. People work really long hours, especially on BD, but nobody complains because they really like their work and believe in the mission.”

Ellora Israni, Junior, Computer Science, Stanford

Product Quality Engineer

Ellora is a self-described talker: she loves talking to people, learning from people, and working with people. Her summer spent as a Product Quality Engineer proved to be as engaging as she had hoped. Combining her computer science background and her collaborative communication style, Ellora wrote new automated tests for the Palantir Metropolis platform, built a demo analyzing teams and performance in the 2012 UEFA Football Championship, and helped the business development and product teams develop new features for customers.

Lesson learned: “The code I write in school is very pointed towards the end result. This summer, it was about what I could write so that other people in the future could understand it. What you’re actually doing is going to be used when you’re gone.”

Will Macrae, Senior, Computer Science and Mathematics, CMU

Software Engineer

Will spent his summer improving Palantir Video’s ability to detect and provide alerts for activity in video footage. Will’s graduate-level algorithms skills didn’t hurt, but he credits a trip to the police department as an essential piece of figuring out the puzzle. During his internship, his team had the opportunity to sit down with real users and witness Palantir Law Enforcement in action.

Lesson learned: “You can throw as much math as you want against a problem, but what you’re doing is for naught unless you know how it’s going to be used and how it’s going to make things better.”

Gautam Kamath, CS BS and ECE BS, Cornell, CS PhD candidate, MIT

Software Engineer

Gautam interned at Palantir after several summers spent doing research for the chance to experience an interesting set of engineering challenges. As a back-end dev, Gautam worked on auto-updating data ingest in Palantir Gotham and wrote code to improve parallelism by reducing lock contention while processing graph links. Gautam’s work had big results: data is now processed up to twice as fast at this stage.

Lesson learned: “The most interesting thing for me is an open problem—when you know there is a problem and there are suggestions on what to do and how to approach it, but there’s no clear solution. Creative design and experimentation need to be involved until you can get it right.”

Max Kolysh, Masters, Engineering, MIT

Forward Deployed Engineer

As a Forward Deployed Engineering intern working with customers in the Federal Government, Max built an improved version of Palantir Gotham’s federated search service that made performing common use cases faster and easier. During his summer, he prototyped a technology that expands the capability of one of Palantir’s data storage platforms for analysis. He was given the task to architect this product from start to finish, with enough time for the inevitable Nerf gun fights that erupt during the workday.

Lesson learned: “Initially I was drawn to Palantir because of its reputation of having the toughest interviews, but I continue to be drawn to Palantir because of its culture and mission. I get to work with some of the smartest people in the world and everyone is friendly and accessible. Building a product that you know is saving lives is also very fulfilling.”

Zach Steward, Senior, ME and CS, MIT

Software Engineer

Zach purposely injected bad code into Palantir Gotham to build a “game” where people would find bugs in the software. After the game was completed, Zach organized a test run with our full-time Quality Engineers to see how well they did at finding bugs. Additionally, with an interest in finance and economics, Zach rotated to Palantir Metropolis for a few weeks and built a custom metric for predictive stock analysis. He presented his findings to the team and back-tested the metric against prior data.

Lesson learned: “Over the summer, I learned how much applications of Palantir could benefit society—and it was good to learn that there are really smart people making this happen.”

Check out the full list of 2012 Intern Projects [PDF]


Intern-Specific Perks

Hot Wheels

If you’re in Palo Alto for the summer, you won’t have to worry about getting around. We provide interns with a bike (and helmet) to use for the summer to get to and from the office.

House Hunters

Our team will help you find housing for the summer, and match you with potential roommates. We believe the Palantir community should go
beyond the office walls.

Full-time, all the time

In addition to the perks we provide for interns, you'll have access to all the full-time fun, too.

All for one, and one for all!

Each intern class is a close-knit group of people who work hard,
and have fun together. We host a number of intern-only events to
help you get to know each other. In addition, you’re invited to
all the company-wide events for a full summer of fun.

 

Bay Area and beyond

Internships are offered in our Palo Alto, New York, and Washington, D.C. offices. For more information on what internships are offered in each location, contact your recruiter!

Palantir On Campus

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