Senior Backend Software Engineer - Infrastructure

The Role

Software Engineers at Palantir build software at scale to transform how organizations use data. Our Software Engineers are involved throughout the product lifecycle, from idea generation, design, prototyping, and production delivery. You will collaborate closely with technical and non‑technical teammates to understand our customers'' problems and build products that solve them. We encourage movement across teams to share context, skills, and experience, so you’ll learn about many different technologies and aspects of each product. Engineers work autonomously and make decisions independently, within a community that will support and challenge you as you grow and develop, becoming a strong technical contributor and engineering leader.

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. Unlike traditional engineering roles, Frontline immerses you in complex, ambiguous problems, empowering you to deliver impactful solutions across some of the world’s most important industries and institutions.

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 reliable, 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 US Security clearance, or eligibility and willingness to obtain a US 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.

Salary

The estimated salary range for this position is $135,000 - $200,000 per year. Total compensation may also include restricted stock units, sign‑on bonus, and other potential future incentives.

Benefits

• Employees (and their eligible dependents) can enroll in medical, dental, and vision insurance as well as voluntary life insurance
• Employees are automatically covered by Palantir’s basic life, AD&D and disability insurance
• Commuter benefits
• Relocation assistance
• Take what you need paid time off, not accrual based
• 2 weeks paid time off built into the end of each year (subject to team and business needs)
• 10 paid holidays throughout the calendar year
• Supportive leave of absence program including time off for military service and medical events
• Paid leave for new parents and subsidized back‑up care for all parents
• Fertility and family building benefits, including but not limited to adoption, surrogacy, and preservation
• Stipend to help with expenses that come with a new child
• Employees can enroll in Palantir’s 401k plan

Palantir is a proud Equal Opportunity Employer for all, including but not limited to veterans and those with disabilities. We are committed to making the application and hiring process accessible to everyone and will provide a reasonable accommodation for those living with a disability. If you need an accommodation for the application or hiring process, please reach out and let us know how we can help.

Some roles allow remote work on an exceptional basis. If the posting specifies Onsite, you are required to work from an office.