Privacy and Civil Liberties Software Engineer, Internship

The Role

The Privacy and Civil Liberties (PCL) Engineering team is a interdisciplinary team of software engineers, forward-deployed engineers, designers, lawyers, and policy experts. The first of its kind in the tech industry, Palantir’s PCL team was formed 15+ years ago as a rejection of the prevailing view that privacy protections must be sacrificed to national security interest. Today, the mission of the PCL team goes far beyond civil liberties protections, and our work challenges other false tradeoffs between operational effectiveness and the defining values of our society: Effective military operations should not be at odds with protecting civilians and upholding the Law of Armed Conflict. Deploying AI with scale and speed should never compromise safety, reliability, and governance. The PCL team builds software and forward deploys to ensure that our customers can pursue their hardest operational challenges while keeping ethical imperatives in plain sight. You can read more about the team on the Palantir blog here.

As a PCL Engineer, you will be responsible for designing and developing full-stack software products for privacy, data protection, AI governance, and accountability in Palantir’s software platforms. You may build security and governance primitives in our platform, applications for auditors, user-facing workflows for AI governance, internal tools for data protection, or something new all-together to help our customers address their next set of challenges. In every case, the software that you build will directly help our customers both carry out their missions more effectively and better meet their legal and ethical obligations. As part of this role, your efforts will be informed by collaborations with technical and non-technical teammates to understand our customers’ key challenges. Your technical approaches will entail engaging with and even helping to shape the latest developments in law and policy.

The skills and background of successful candidates may vary highly, but curiosity, grit, and a drive to run toward hard socio-technical problems are critical for our team. We’re looking for engineers who are passionate about addressing real-world challenges and empowering our customers to carry out their workflows both effectively and responsibly.

Core Responsibilities

As an PCL Engineer Intern, you’ll work in small teams with minimal supervision and own end-to-end execution of high stakes projects. No two projects are the same: you might work as a software engineer improving core products in our platform, as a forward-deployed engineering using our platform to improve our customers workflows, or as a policy researcher understanding the impacts of the latest developments in law and policy. PCL Engineer Interns are treated just like full time PCL Engineers, with significant freedom and ownership over their work. Interns take responsibility for real-world projects and outcomes that our customers rely on.

Our Principles

• PCL Impact: We work on challenging problems at the intersection of technology and ethics. We reject the idea that technology alone is the appropriate fit for every problem, especially socio-technical challenges, and we work to understand where our customers can better leverage technology to improve accountability, governance, privacy and related fundamental rights. We often take on projects that are completely novel and often resist simple framings, as long as we believe pursuing the work will change the world for the better.
• Ownership: We see projects through from beginning to end, working through any obstacles we may encounter, using an array of engineering tools that are best suited for the task at hand. We trust each other to effectively handle time and priorities and give people the space to think for themselves.
• Collaboration: We work internally with people from a variety of backgrounds - such as forward-deployed engineers, deployment strategists, product teams, and lawyers. We also work externally with our customers, often on site, to understand and tackle their problems.

What We Value

• Interest in both understanding the impact of technology in society and working to address it
• Ability to continuously learn, work independently, and make decisions with minimal direction
• Ability to collaborate in teams of technical and non-technical individuals, and comfortable working in a constantly evolving environment with dynamic objectives and iteration with users
• An eagerness to creatively solve technical problems with data structures, storage systems, cloud infrastructure, front-end frameworks, and other technical tools
• Experience or curiosity in any of the following domains is a plus: privacy, data protection, AI governance, AI testing & evaluation, national security, technology policy, technology ethics

What We Require

• Engineering background, preferred in fields such as Computer Science, Mathematics, Software Engineering, Physics, and Data Science
• Proficiency with one or more programming languages, such as Python, Java, C++, TypeScript/JavaScript, or similar
• Must be planning on graduating in 2027. This should be your final internship before graduating.