Software Engineer - Applied AI, Defense Applications

The Role

Palantir's Defense Applied AI product team builds products that help the modern warfighter leverage AI for their most mission-critical work. You will help own the entire end to end Agent experience in our products and work relentlessly to ensure they deliver value for our users, while maintaining a high bar for quality.

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 users to refine the UX of a particular workflow, the next you could be fine-tuning performance to enable low-latency or more accurate 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 both developers and end-users to work optimally. If you’re motivated to develop reliable, performant, and scalable AI products, this role offers the opportunity to make a significant impact on our products and the people who use them.

Core Responsibilities

• Design and build AI agents that help defense and intelligence users investigate complex questions, analyze operational data, develop plans, and produce actionable work
• Relentlessly focus on improving agent experience through data-driven evals across memory, tool and skill design, context management, fine-tuning, and more
• Actively improve user workflows by collaborating with cross-functional teams, ensuring seamless experiences across product boundaries and a cohesive user experience
• Build intuitive interfaces that let users direct agents, follow their progress, inspect supporting evidence, review proposed actions, and refine the resulting work
• Own features from early experimentation through production deployment, working with users, designers, and engineers to turn specific mission needs into reliable, reusable product capabilities
• Optimizing applications for speed and scalability through performance analysis and with high-scale, complex data

What We Value

• Strong product instincts and attention to the details that make complex software intuitive and useful
• Ability to communicate and collaborate with a variety of individuals, including engineers, users and non-technical team members
• Experience building applications with LLMs, including tool design, context management, agent workflows, or evaluation
• Willingness to learn and make decisions independently, the ability to ask questions effectively, and the skills to iterate directly with users and own core outcomes
• Curiosity about emerging AI capabilities and sound judgment about where they can solve real user problems

What We Require

• Experience coding in programming languages, such as Java, C++, Python, JavaScript, or similar languages
• Strong software engineering skills and experience delivering production applications
• Strong proficiency in React and Typescript
• Engineering background in Computer Science, Mathematics, Software Engineering, Physics or similar field
• Strong written and verbal communication skills and ability to iterate quickly with teammates, incorporating feedback and holding a high bar for quality
• Active US Security clearance or eligibility and willingness to obtain a US Security clearance