Backend Software Engineer - Defense

The Role

Palantir's defense product vertical builds mission-critical products for the modern warfighter. We provide a complete ecosystem where customers can securely integrate and visualize their data, and build sophisticated, full-fledged programs such as common operating pictures, alert-triaging inboxes, and resource allocation planning tools driven by rich-ML models. Our customers use our defense offering to perform rich analyses that drive core operations within their organizations - these programs are relied upon for daily operations in the command centers and battlefronts of militaries across the world.

Backend Software Engineers at Palantir build software at scale to transform how organizations use data. Our Software Engineers are involved throughout the product lifecycle, from idea generation, design, prototyping, and production delivery. You will collaborate closely with technical and non-technical teammates to understand our customers' problems and build products that solve them. We encourage movement across teams to share context, skills, and experience, so you'll learn about many different technologies and aspects of each product. Engineers work autonomously and make decisions independently, within a community that will support and challenge you as you grow and develop, becoming a strong technical contributor and engineering leader.

Your day-to-day workflow will vary, adapting to the requirements of our users and the technical challenges that arise. One day, you may find yourself collaborating with other engineers to architect a new system that enables a novel workflow, the next you could be fine-tuning performance to enable low-latency operational outcomes.

Our Product Development organization is made up of small teams of Software Engineers. Each team focuses on a specific aspect of a product and work collaboratively to build cross functional capabilities, streamline user workflows and continuously improve our software's efficiency and reliability.

We're hiring engineers who are passionate about solving real-world problems and empowering developers and end-users to do their work optimally. If you’re motivated to develop reliable, performant, scalable systems and design robust APIs and primitives, please join us.

Some examples of product work you could work on are:

• Build for high-scale, collaborative, geospatial workflows (Gaia)
• Design sophisticated frameworks to enable complex workflows across applications in a single workspace
• Develop the next generation of real-time collaborative tooling and data-analysis solutions (Secure Collaboration)

Core Responsibilities

• Architecting, developing, and maintaining high-performance, scalable backend services that underpin our our operational data and AI systems
• Maintaining high coding standards through the development of guidelines, active participation in code reviews, and fostering a culture of continuous improvement and knowledge sharing among your team
• Building robust APIs for use by front-end developers and interfacing external systems, and collaborating with front-end developers to integrate user-facing elements with server-side logic
• Designing efficient data structures and algorithms to manage large-scale and high throughput data
• Optimizing applications for speed and scalability through performance analysis
• Actively improve user workflows by collaborating with cross-functional teams, ensuring seamless experiences across product boundaries and a cohesive user experience

Technologies We Use

• Different backend languages, including Java, Rust, Python and Go
• Distributed systems technologies such as Kafka, Cassandra, Elasticsearch and Spark
• Docker and Kubernetes for containerization and orchestration
• Industry-standard build tooling, including Gradle and GitHub

What We Value

• A deep understanding of server-side logic, efficient data handling, and distributed systems
• Strong focus on creating user-oriented workflows and solutions, crossing product boundaries to deliver cohesive and solid user workflows that ensure a seamless and intuitive user experience
• Experience building high-quality software in a fast-paced CI/CD development environment
• Ability to work collaboratively in teams of technical and non-technical individuals and understand how technical decisions impact the people who will use what you're building
• Skill and comfort working in a constantly evolving environment with dynamic objectives and iteration with users

What We Require

• Experience in designing and developing features and improvements, as well as supporting and maintaining, live backend systems
• In-depth understanding of data structures, system architecture, API development for microservices frameworks, distributed systems and other backend-related concepts and best practices
• Engineering background in Computer Science, Mathematics, Software Engineering, Physics or similar field
• Strong coding skills with demonstrated proficiency in programming languages, such as Java, C++, Python, Rust, or similar languages
• Strong written and verbal communication skills and ability to iterate quickly with teammates, incorporating feedback and holding a high bar for quality
• Eligibility and willingness to obtain a US Security clearance