Software Engineer - Apollo Systems

The Role

Apollo is Palantir’s autonomous software management and deployment platform. It enables seamless, continuous delivery of mission-critical software (Foundry, Gotham, AIP) across a vast range of environments: on-prem, public cloud, disconnected (air-gapped) networks, and highly regulated settings (including IL-5 and FedRAMP).

As a Software Engineer on the Apollo team, you’ll build and operate a large-scale distributed system to allow the remote operation and maintenance of Kubernetes clusters. Our mission is to extract the entire state of a cluster into a portable, high-performance artifact within minutes, enabling full and almost instant cluster reconstruction from the ground up-all while pushing the limits of speed, reliability, and scale.

You’ll design and implement backup and restore solutions for Kubernetes, leveraging proprietary compression infrastructure tailored to Palantir’s unique deployment models. You’ll also build and optimize our container artifact store, which is based on the OCI (Open Container Initiative) distribution spec -the industry standard for storing and distributing container images and artifacts. You’ll own the backbone of every environment Apollo supports, from hyperscalers to Army trucks.

If you’re excited by challenges at the intersection of container technologies like OCI and docker, storage, and distributed systems, you’ll find opportunities here to dive deep into storage formats and low-level optimizations, where milliseconds matter. As we increasingly automate cluster creation and management on diverse hardware, you’ll play a key role in scaling Palantir’s presence at the edge and solving tough distributed systems problems. You’ll own the full development lifecycle-from idea generation and design, through implementation, to operation and support-while collaborating closely with both technical and non-technical stakeholders to deliver robust, impactful infrastructure. The usage of AI tools (Claude Code/Codex/Copilot) is highly encouraged!

Core Responsibilities

• Build and maintain highly available systems responsible for orchestration of software deployment across hundreds of production environments
• Develop performance sensitive storage features and optimizations to store and serve Palantir products
• Engage and solve problems that customers need today with a tight feedback loop for what is important and what works
• Working directly with other teams to solve problems that cross the team boundary
• Debug complex issues and performance problems throughout the stack, including open source

What We Value

• Systems programming experience with strong proficiency in golang, Java or equivalent. This is a highly hands on, code writing heavy position!
• Some familiarity with containers (Docker) and orchestration (Kubernetes) at scale
• Experience working with hosted container registries such as Amazon Elastic Container Registry (ECR), Google Artifact Registry, or Azure Container Registry (ACR) is highly desirable
• Familiarity with the OCI Distribution Spec and open source registry projects (e.g., distribution/distribution, Harbor)
• Experience designing, building, and operating high-scale observability or infrastructure systems
• Experience building high-quality software in a fast-paced CI/CD development environment
• High empathy for developer and operators workflows and productivity

What We Require

• 4+ years of professional software development experience on core infrastructure with emphasis on operational excellence
• 2+ years of experience contributing to the system design or architecture (architecture, design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and existing systems
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or equivalent