Software Engineer - Defense Applications

A World-Changing Company

Palantir builds the world’s leading software for data-driven decisions and operations. By bringing the right data to the people who need it, our platforms empower our partners to develop lifesaving drugs, forecast supply chain disruptions, locate missing children, and more.

The Role

Palantir’s software forms the operating system for the militaries of the United States and her allies, driving outcomes and enhancing capabilities across the full spectrum of operations, intelligence, and support activities. Our defense applications are the tip of that spear, powerful tools used daily by thousands of soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines to perform critical work at home and abroad from the Pentagon to the front lines. The engineers who build, maintain, and extend these applications are responsible for wielding the immense technical potential of Palantir’s data modeling and AI platforms to create exquisite domain-specific workflows and interfaces that modernize, extend, and revolutionize the capabilities of the warfighter.

This is a front-end engineering role focused on marrying Palantir’s Foundry and AIP platform technologies, application specific backend services, and modern web technologies with domain expertise. These teams are nimble and select the right tool for the task in front of them rather than adhering to a rigidly defined tech stack, but the most common setups are React for standard DOM rendering, Maplibre and/or Three js for geospatial and 3D rendering, Redux (in various flavors) for state management, Conjure for API management, and OSDK for interaction with the foundry platform. A rich ecosystem of in-house libraries and toolchains sit on top of that foundation to provide cross-app messaging, live data streaming, robust classification based access control, and a host of other specialized functions. Defense applications developers both consume and produce these re-usable tools as part of their core engineering role.

Core Responsibilities

As an engineer on a defense application team you’ll be responsible for owning, not just executing, user-facing feature additions or enhancements. Defense product teams are forward-leaning by nature, you can expect to spend time hands-on with customers and forward-deployed engineers to design solutions that not only meet the need but deliver value rapidly to support customers in ever-changing environments. The dynamic nature of the defense applications teams make for, on average, shorter project cycles with high ownership at the individual contributor level but demand flexibility, practicality, and responsibility.

The highly autonomous nature of teams means you will transition from mentee to mentor quickly as you build unique expertise in specific applications and features. Palantir’s engineering culture puts a premium on everyone having the skills and willingness to teach and learn, regardless of tenure. The best Palantir engineers form strong convictions quickly (to avoid analysis paralysis when every day counts) but hold them weakly, always ready to revise their opinion and update their world view when new ideas or additional data points are presented.