What working at Palantir was actually like
I worked at Palantir between 2021 and 2023, as a forward deployed engineer and then tech lead. People often ask me what working at Palantir was actually like. Rather than write it all up myself, here are three blogs by others that I think accurately describe my experience there.
Reflections on Palantir
Nabeel Qureshi spent eight years at Palantir as a forward deployed engineer. This is the most comprehensive of the three: it covers the talent and culture, how the FDE model works in practice, why data integration is the core of the business, the flat no-titles structure, and the ethics of working on defence and government problems.
Lessons from Palantir alums about building a tech company
Sanjay Saraf's writeup of a panel of Palantir veterans. It captures the organisational chaos well: deals starting from intensive on-site pilots, authority coming from field credibility rather than titles, extreme internal transparency, and the high-intensity push to get something working quickly.
The Great Data Integration Schlep
Sarah Constantin on what 'digital transformation' actually means day to day. Most enterprise data is messy, siloed, or guarded by internal politics, and getting access to it is slow human work: negotiation, building buy-in, and cleaning data by hand. This matches the bulk of what forward deployed work really involves, and it's a useful corrective to the idea that Palantir's value comes from just magic technology.