Forward Deployed Software Engineer - US Government

The Role

Forward Deployed Software Engineers (FDSEs) understand our customers’ greatest pain points and design end-to-end solutions to address them. FDSEs solicit constant feedback on their work from both customers and colleagues, improving our products over time with rapid iteration cycles.

FDSEs deploy ground breaking technical solutions to solve our customers’ hardest problems. Projects often start with a nebulous question like “Why are we losing customers?” or “How can we more effectively identify instances of money laundering?” FDSEs lead the way in developing a solution, from high-level system design and prototyping to application development and data integration. As an FDSE, you leverage everything around you: Palantir products, open source technologies, and anything you and your team can build to drive real impact.

You work with customers around the globe, where you gain rare insight into the world’s most important industries and institutions. We help our customers detect insider trading, improve disaster relief, fight healthcare fraud, and more. Each mission presents different challenges, from the regulatory environment to the nature of the data to the user population. You will work to accommodate all aspects of an environment to drive real technical outcomes for our customers.

Whether you aspire to be an entrepreneur or an engineering leader, we believe Palantir is the best place - with the best colleagues - to learn how. You’ll learn how to unpack a problem and understand the costs and consequences of its solution. You’ll learn new technologies and languages, and even develop them yourself. You’ll work autonomously and make decisions independently, within a community that will support and challenge you as you grow and develop.

Technologies We Use

• Core Palantir products provide the foundations for our deployments.
• Custom applications built on top of core Palantir platforms.
• Postgres, Cassandra, Hadoop, and Spark for distributed data storage and parallel computing.
• Java and Groovy for our back-end applications and data integration tools.
• Typescript, React, Leaflet, and d3 for our web technologies.
• Python for data processing and analysis.
• Palantir cloud infrastructure based on AWS EC2 and S3.

Our Principles

• Impact: We take on meaningful and challenging projects that change the world for the better.
• Ownership: We see projects through from beginning to end, working through any obstacles we may encounter.
• Collaboration: We work internally with people from a variety of backgrounds - such as other FDSEs, product teams, and Deployment Strategists. We also work externally with our customers, often on site, to understand and solve their problems.
• Trust: We trust each other to effectively manage time and priorities and give people the space to think for themselves.
• Growth: We encourage ourselves and our peers to seek new challenges and opportunities for growth, as well as find new ways to innovate and share knowledge.
• Learning: We often face entirely novel problems where we need to pick up a lot of new knowledge and learn how to use it to make progress. We believe experiential learning is one of the best teachers.

What We Value

• Active US Security Clearance at or above the Top Secret level or willingness to obtain/upgrade to or above Top Secret.
• Strong engineering background, preferred in fields such as Computer Science, Mathematics, Software Engineering, Physics.
• Experience with logistics, materiel, sustainment, aviation, or readiness analysis is a plus.
• Familiarity with data structures, storage systems, cloud infrastructure, front-end frameworks, and other technical tools.
• Understanding of how technical decisions impact the user of what you’re building.
• Strong coder with demonstrated proficiency in programming languages such as Python, Java, C++, TypeScript/JavaScript, or similar.
• Demonstrated ability to collaborate effectively in teams of technical and non-technical individuals, and comfortable working in a rapidly changing environment with dynamic objectives and iteration with users.
• Demonstrated ability to continuously learn, work independently, and make decisions with minimal supervision.
• Willingness and interest to travel as needed.