Senior Backend Software Engineer - Infrastructure

A Senior Backend Software Engineer - Infrastructure at Palantir will contribute high-quality code to underpin Palantir Foundry and Gotham with performant, secure, and scalable building blocks, enabling products deployed to the most important institutions in the public and private sector.

The role involves building a performant search and indexing ecosystem for complex granularly permissioned data, contributing to open-source data processing libraries, and designing architecture and opinionated APIs to keep application developers on the happy path.

As a member of the infrastructure team, you will work on building the foundational capabilities that power our products used by research scientists, aerospace engineers, intelligence analysts, and economic forecasters, in countries around the world.

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 systems, and to design robust APIs and primitives, this role offers the opportunity to make a significant impact on our products and the people who use them.

Frontline Foundry Software Engineers may be offered the opportunity to Frontline, an exclusive program unlike any other. This unique, short-term assignment involves being embedded with customers, allowing you to work directly with users and gain firsthand insight into how our products are used and the challenges our customers face.

Some of our most successful products were built on the factory floor, addressing real-world problems for the world's most important institutions. These products were developed by some of our most successful product engineers, who began their careers in roles aligned with Frontline responsibilities, gaining a deep understanding of both our technology and our customers.

Core Responsibilities:

• Building a performant search and indexing ecosystem for complex granularly permissioned data
• Contributing to open-source data processing libraries, integrating the latest innovations to achieve performance gains
• Building the distributed systems that power large scale compute workloads, orchestrating and efficiently scheduling hundreds of thousands of containers every hour
• Designing architecture and opinionated APIs to keep application developers on the happy path
• Tracing and performance observability in high scale distributed microservice architectures
• Building reliant, performant, and scalable systems for storage, auth, or asset serving to enable other product teams to build robust applications without deep domain expertise in the underlying systems
• Automating the deployment, management, and operations of complex distributed systems like Cassandra, Elasticsearch, Kafka, and more across different environments

Technologies We Use:

• Different backend languages, including Java, Rust, and Go
• Open-source technologies like Cassandra, ElasticSearch, Spark, Kafka, Kubernetes, Flink
• Industry-standard build tooling, including Gradle and GitHub

What We Value:

• Demonstrated ability to collaborate and empathize with a variety of individuals. Able to iterate with users and non-technical stakeholders and understand how technical decisions impact them.
• Ability to learn new technology and concepts, even without in-depth experience. Experience developing and managing highly-available distributed systems is beneficial, but not required.
• Bias towards quality and thoughtful about edge cases (“anything that can go wrong will go wrong”); writes code that is defensive against all possibilities.
• Leading solutions and APIs with users in mind while maintaining a high engineering bar. Seeks to centralize and abstract complexity away from our users in order to expose simple, powerful APIs for consumers.
• Active UK Security clearance, or eligibility and willingness to obtain a UK Security clearance is beneficial, but not necessary.

What We Require:

• 6+ years of experience designing, building, and operating scalable and reliable infrastructure systems in a production environment
• Engineering background in Computer Science, Mathematics, Software Engineering, Physics or similar field.
• Strong coding skills with demonstrated proficiency in programming languages, such as Java, C++, Python, Rust, or similar languages.
• Familiarity with storage and data processing systems, cloud infrastructure, and other technical tools.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills and ability to iterate quickly with teammates, incorporating feedback and holding a high bar for quality.

Additional Information:

Life at Palantir

We want every Palantirian to achieve their best outcomes, that’s why we celebrate individuals’ strengths, skills, and interests, from your first interview to your longterm growth, rather than rely on traditional career ladders. Paying attention to the needs of our community enables us to optimize our opportunities to grow and helps ensure many pathways to success at Palantir.

Promoting health and well-being across all areas of Palantirians’ lives is just one of the ways we’re investing in our community. Learn more at Life at Palantir and note that our offerings may vary by region.

In keeping consistent with Palantir’s values and culture, we believe employees are “better together” and in-person work affords the opportunity for more creative outcomes. Therefore, we encourage employees to work from our offices to foster connectivity and innovation. Many teams do offer hybrid options (WFH a day or two a week), allowing our employees to strike