I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Palantir Technologies in Jan 2014
Interview
I was first contacted by an HR to schedule a phone screen. The engineer on the phone screen was very nice to help walk me through the question and helped me debug a bit after I had written my code, but I guess he did not think I was good enough to work at Palantir.
Palantir really stresses a strong algorithm background (just like many of the other top tech companies), but I find it ironic that the day to day jobs at these companies rarely involve these algorithm skills. It is sad that they assess candidates on 1-2 interview questions over a 45 minute phone interview.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given an array of integers and an int k, rotate every element inside the array to the right by k units.
Do this in O(n) time and O(1) space.
I proposed a O(kn) solution, but that was not good enough.
They want the very best solution.
I applied online. The process took 5 weeks. I interviewed at Palantir Technologies (Palo Alto, CA) in Mar 2015
Interview
Got a response about 2 months after applying online, saying that they were impressed with my Ruby on Rails work or something. For some reason they didn't have me do the online coding challenge. 4 days after my phone screening the called me back telling me that they wanted me to go on site for more interviews.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
We have strings of format A_ _ _ _ _ _ _, an A followed by 6 spaces that can be a number 0-9. We also have regular expressions with the operations "or" and "*" defined as follows:. The easiest way to illustrate this is to give an example. "A000001 or A000000" has size 2 because it matches two strings. "*" represents a wild card, so A00000* has size 10 because it matches 10 different strings, (A000000 - A000009).
"A0* or A1*" has size 20,000 because it matches 20,000 different strings.
The question was this:
Write a function that takes in a number N and outputs a regular expression that matches exactly N strings of format A _ _ _ _ _ _.