Backend Software Engineer - Infrastructure

The Role

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.

Our Product Development organization is made up of small teams of Software Engineers. Each team focuses on a specific aspect of a product. Our infrastructure teams are responsible for the lowest layers of our software stack, often focused on database technologies, distributed systems, large scale data systems, security, and application infrastructure. As a Software Engineer on infrastructure, you'll contribute high-quality code to underpin Palantir Foundry and Gotham with performant, secure, and scalable building blocks, enabling products deployed to the most important institutions in the public and private sector. You'll build the foundational capabilities that power our products used by research scientists, aerospace engineers, intelligence analysts, and economic forecasters, in countries around the world.

We’re hiring engineers who are passionate about solving real-world problems and empowering both developers and end-users to work optimally. If you’re motivated to develop reliable, performant, and scalable systems, and to design robust APIs and primitives, this role offers the opportunity to make a significant impact on our products and the people who use them.

Frontline

Foundry Software Engineers may be offered the opportunity to Frontline, an exclusive program unlike any other. This unique, short-term assignment involves being embedded with customers, allowing you to work directly with users and gain firsthand insight into how our products are used and the challenges our customers face. Unlike traditional engineering roles, Frontline immerses you in complex, ambiguous problems, empowering you to deliver impactful solutions across some of the world’s most important industries and institutions.

Some of our most successful products were built on the factory floor, addressing real-world problems for the world's most important institutions. These products were developed by some of our most successful product engineers, who began their careers in roles aligned with Frontline responsibilities, gaining a deep understanding of both our technology and our customers.

Frontliners operate across a broad spectrum of responsibilities, much like a startup CTO. They work in small teams to own the end-to-end execution of high-stakes projects. This spectrum ranges from discussing architecture and building custom web apps to conducting workshops with users and strategizing with customer executives. No two days are alike, as each day is diverse and impactful. By witnessing how customers engage with Foundry and experiencing these pain points firsthand, you’ll gain unique insights that feed directly back into our development process, helping to refine and enhance our products.

Core Responsibilities

• Building a performant search and indexing ecosystem for complex granularly permissioned data
• Contributing to open-source data processing libraries, integrating the latest innovations to achieve performance gains
• Building the distributed systems that power large scale compute workloads, orchestrating and efficiently scheduling hundreds of thousands of containers every hour
• Designing architecture and opinionated APIs to keep application developers on the happy path
• Tracing and performance observability in high scale distributed microservice architectures
• Building reliant, performant, and scalable systems for storage, auth, or asset serving to enable other product teams to build robust applications without deep domain expertise in the underlying systems
• Automating the deployment, management, and operations of complex distributed systems like Cassandra, Elasticsearch, Kafka, and more across different environments

Technologies We Use

• Different backend languages, including Java, Rust, and Go
• Open-source technologies like Cassandra, ElasticSearch, Spark, Kafka, Kubernetes, Flink
• Industry-standard build tooling, including Gradle and GitHub

What We Value

• Demonstrated ability to collaborate and empathise with a variety of individuals. Able to iterate with users and non-technical stakeholders and understand how technical decisions impact them.
• Ability to learn new technology and concepts, even without in-depth experience. Experience developing and managing highly-available distributed systems is beneficial, but not required.
• Bias towards quality and thoughtful about edge cases (“anything that can go wrong will go wrong”); writes code that is defensive against all possibilities.
• Builds solutions and APIs with users in mind while maintaining a high engineering bar. Seeks to centralise and abstract complexity away from our users in order to expose simple, powerful APIs for consumers.
• Active UK Security clearance, or eligibility and willingness to obtain a UK Security clearance is beneficial, but not necessary.

What We Require

• 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.
• Familiarity with storage and data processing systems, cloud infrastructure, and other technical tools.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills and ability to iterate quickly with teammates, incorporating feedback and holding a high bar for quality.