About this role
Palantir needs a skilled engineer to build scalable query planning, execution, and storage integrations that turn complex computations into efficient execution plans for data-driven platforms. Backend software engineers in the product development organisation transform how organisations use data by taking ownership of the full product lifecycle from idea generation to production delivery. The engineering team operates autonomously within small groups, designing robust APIs and primitives that empower both developers and end-users.
In this role, the software engineer focuses on query engines, designing query optimisation capabilities, extending execution engines, and developing catalog integrations. Team members work closely with technical and non-technical colleagues, with opportunities to participate in the Frontline program for direct customer engagement. Ideal candidates bring a strong ownership mindset, practical approaches to performance profiling, and experience building distributed data processing systems or database engines.
What you will do
- Design and implement query planning and optimisation capabilities that translate complex computations into efficient execution plans.
- Extend execution engines with new capabilities while improving query operators, parallelism, memory management, and data movement.
- Develop catalog and engine integrations including table metadata, transactions, and efficient reads and writes.
- Build shared transformation semantics and execution interfaces for workloads across products and platform services.
- Improve incremental processing so pipelines reuse previous results and process new data efficiently while preserving correctness.
- Evaluate and integrate advances in open-source data systems, validating their behavior and performance against real-world workloads.
- Investigate correctness and performance issues across planning, execution, and storage while building tests and benchmarks to prevent regressions.
- Collaborate with product teams and customers to translate operational needs into engine capabilities that integrate with security, data management, and infrastructure.
What you need
- Four or more years of professional software engineering experience building and operating production systems.
- An engineering background in Computer Science, Mathematics, Software Engineering, Physics, or a similar field, or equivalent practical experience.
- Strong coding skills with demonstrated proficiency in one or more languages such as Java, Rust, Scala, or C++.
- Experience developing database engines, distributed data processing systems, storage systems, or comparable infrastructure.
- Depth in areas such as query planning, execution, or performance optimization.
- Strong foundations in algorithms, data structures, and concurrency with experience diagnosing correctness and performance problems in complex systems.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills with the ability to work effectively across teams and incorporate feedback.
Nice to have
- Experience building or extending systems such as Spark, DataFusion, Iceberg, or comparable technologies
- Experience contributing to open-source projects
Skills and tech stack
Questions candidates ask
What is the remote work policy?
Palantir believes employees are better together and in-person work affords the opportunity for more creative outcomes, so employees are encouraged to work from offices. Many teams do offer hybrid options, allowing employees to work from home a day or two a week based on business need.
What technologies are used in this role?
Engineering teams use programming languages including Java, Scala, Rust, and Python, alongside data processing frameworks such as Apache Spark, Apache DataFusion, Apache Comet, and Velox. Additional technologies include Apache Iceberg, Apache Arrow, Apache Parquet, Gradle, Cargo, and GitHub.
What does the team structure look like?
The product development organisation is made up of small teams of software engineers. Each team focuses on a specific aspect of a product and works collaboratively to build cross-functional capabilities and streamline user workflows.