Real Work, Real Connections: Learning and Growing as a Palantir Intern

Not your typical summer internship

Choosing impact and responsibility

As I was nearing the end of my last internship in the summer of 2021, I faced the difficult question of where my next career step would take me. My work, while mildly interesting, felt divorced from real-world needs and didn’t inspire any feelings of enthusiasm or interest beyond some vague, abstract sense of technical progress in the codebase. What I really wanted was also what I felt like I was missing — somewhere I could grow technically while making a real impact in the world; somewhere with a strong culture of technical ownership, where I could feel true responsibility over a product that made a difference. When a Palantir recruiter reached out to me, agreeing to an interview wasn’t a difficult decision.

What I really wanted was also what I felt like I was missing — somewhere I could grow technically while making a real impact in the world; somewhere with a strong culture of technical ownership, where I could feel true responsibility over a product that made a difference.

Fast forward to when I got my offer for a Summer 2022 internship. I thought carefully through the pros and cons of accepting it. If you haven’t read through them yet, Palantir’s compendium of blog posts explain why Palantir is a unique and compelling place to work. In addition to the reasons so eloquently laid out by my peers, though, another specific factor behind my decision to become a Palantirian was the specific org I would join: Production Infrastructure, which produces Palantir Apollo.

While Foundry and Gotham take on the tasks of supporting the operations of some of the world’s most important institutions, Apollo performs the equally Herculean task of providing a stable, usable platform for the tens of thousands of individual services that support these operations. Working in Production Infrastructure offered a unique opportunity to see how distributed systems are deployed at massive scale to solve real problems.

Moving beyond a traditional career path

Although Palantir is most known for its tech, now that I’ve been here for a summer, I believe the most compelling benefit of working here is the opportunity for personal growth. Speaking from both personal and anecdotal experience, at most other companies, your “growth path” as a software engineer is clearly and explicitly mapped out for you. Starting full-time comes with being expected to perform at [L3/E3/generic new-grad level] for up to 2 years until being promoted to [L4/E4/generic mid-level engineer], where you will stay for up to 3 more years until being promoted to [L5/E5/generic senior engineer].

This bureaucratic, one-size-fits-all approach carries over into internships: often, an intern just has a project dropped into their lap on day one and is told to toil away on it for the next 12 weeks until they end, when some combination of their manager, an opaque hiring committee, and a lottery ball machine evaluate their work and spit out a return offer or rejection.

This is what I was preparing myself for when I arrived at Palantir: a predetermined and choreographed small-to-medium task which would serve partially to keep me busy on something of precisely average usefulness while also serving as a barometer of my suitability to return as a full-time engineer.

The reality was quite different. I immediately had multiple meetings with my mentor, my tech lead, and other engineering leads after I onboarded, all of whom wanted to know first and foremost exactly what I was hoping to achieve in my internship. When I expressed my distaste for the aforementioned category of boondoggled intern projects, I got to pick for myself a relatively unscoped task already on my mentor’s critical path that would serve an immediate and visible benefit to the team. (This is consistent with the broader ethos of Palantir’s flat structure, which is designed to allow people great flexibility in the problems they choose to work on.)

I got to pick for myself a relatively unscoped task already on my mentor’s critical path that would serve an immediate and visible benefit to the team.

Going both deep and broad

Over the next 10 weeks, I worked on several key projects and products critical to the team’s success. By owning (read: fixing) the key component I’d revamped in my first task — after causing an incident — I got to grapple with the nuances and complexities of low-level feature work. By participating in a major push to make our team’s products deployable without complex cloud infrastructure backing it, I gained a much better high-level understanding of the decisions behind our back-end architecture and the specific functionalities of Kubernetes that we leveraged. I came to appreciate the full capabilities of what Production Infrastructure at Palantir delivers and to become excited about the future of tech we were working towards in a way that wouldn’t have been possible if I had just focused for 12 weeks on delivering a single feature.

It would be genuinely difficult for me to overstate the amount of mental energy that everyone involved in my internship, especially my mentor and tech lead, seemed to put into helping me both grow out of my weaknesses and leverage my strengths in contributing to my team’s roadmap. When I first started my task, my mentor asked me to draw up a quick design doc, and an hour later I proudly assaulted him with what was in hindsight probably the most unapologetically terrible RFC (request for comments, or technical proposal) he’ll ever read in his life. After hours of patient discussion and iteration with my mentor and tech lead, I not only produced an acceptable RFC, but also internalized some of the behavioral and technical patterns they don’t teach you at MIT that facilitate such work.

The recipe for success

Multiple times over the course of the summer, my mentor and lead checked in and offered valuable and deeply insightful commentary and growth notes on aspects I would need to improve to advance in my career as well as strengths I could lean on to deliver value. I’m humbled by how people at Palantir have consistently demonstrated that in order to perform well here, you can’t just function as an atomized individual who simply exchanges code for a paycheck: you must be an empathetic, thoughtful member of a community always striving to improve themselves, their peers, and the world.

Over the course of my internship, I learned that Palantir uniquely combines a structure of unstructured autonomy in which you have a say in how you create value with a culture of support and growth. Together, those empower you to make greater and greater contributions to the world over time.

If you work best when you have a sense of rigid structure and clear expectations from those above you, that’s fine! I’ve experienced for myself how many companies cater to that instinct. But if you’re ready to leave the structure of school to engage with the chaos of the real world, to learn and fight and grow into a real leader of the changes you want to see happen, I encourage you to check out the opportunities Palantir has available for interns and people early in their careers.

Author: Allen H., Summer 2022 intern, Production Infrastructure at Palantir