Palantir DevOps / SRE Interview Questions

1.Tell me about a time you inherited or were handed an infrastructure problem with no clear scope — no runbook, no owner, no obvious fix. How did you figure out what the problem actually was and where you started?

2.Walk me through a time you were paged during an incident that was actively impacting users and you were the most senior person available. What did you do first, and how did the situation resolve?

3.Describe a time you had to explain a major infrastructure decision — say, a migration, an SLA change, or a cost trade-off — to a non-technical audience like product leadership or a customer. How did you frame it, and how did they respond?

4.Tell me about a time you had to get productive in a completely unfamiliar technical domain — a new cloud provider, a new compliance framework, an unfamiliar stack — because a project required it. How fast did you get there, and how?

5.Tell me about a time you were asked to improve reliability or reduce toil on a system, but no one could tell you exactly what 'good' looked like. How did you define success, and how did you decide what to work on first?

6.Walk me through a time you were under an externally imposed hard deadline — a customer commitment, a regulatory deadline, a government contract — and the infrastructure wasn't going to be ready in time. What did you do, and would you make the same call again?

7.You need to write a script that tails logs from a Kubernetes pod and alerts when a specific error pattern appears more than 10 times in a 60-second window. How would you approach this in Python or Go, and what edge cases would you handle?

8.A Kubernetes node in a customer's on-prem cluster is reporting NotReady and two pods from a critical Foundry pipeline have been evicted. You have kubectl access but no visibility into the underlying hypervisor. What's your diagnostic sequence?

9.Apollo needs to deliver a software update to a fleet of 500 environments — some cloud, some air-gapped — where roughly 5% have historically failed mid-update and left services in a partially upgraded state. How would you design the rollout strategy to minimize blast radius?

10.A Foundry pipeline runs a nightly Spark job that ingests 2TB of Parquet data, and it's started missing its 6 AM SLA — finishing at 8 or 9 AM instead. You have access to the Spark UI and the job history server. Walk me through how you'd diagnose and fix it.

11.Design a secrets management architecture for Apollo deployments that spans cloud environments, on-prem bare metal, and fully air-gapped classified networks — with no single secrets store that all three tiers can reach. How do you handle secret rotation?

12.You're responsible for the SLO framework for a multi-tenant Foundry deployment serving 15 government customers on shared infrastructure. Two customers are in the same availability zone and one's heavy batch workload is causing P99 latency spikes for the other's interactive queries. How do you architect your way out of this?

13.Design a health-check and status-page system for Apollo that gives both internal Palantir engineers and external customers real-time visibility into deployment health across cloud and on-prem environments — without leaking classified deployment topology.

14.Design a cost attribution system for a multi-tenant Foundry deployment where dozens of customers share the same cloud infrastructure. Product leadership wants a dashboard showing per-customer cloud spend — how would you build it?

15.Design a canary deployment system for AIP that lets Palantir safely roll out new LLM inference backend versions to a subset of enterprise customers before full release — without customers opting into a beta program.

16.Design a distributed rate-limiting system for the AIP API gateway that protects shared LLM inference capacity across hundreds of enterprise tenants — each with different contracted usage tiers — while keeping p99 latency impact under 5ms.

17.Design a log aggregation and search system for Gotham that ingests operational logs from analysts' query sessions and pipeline executions — but where certain log fields may be classified at different levels and must never be co-mingled in the same search index.

18.Design a self-healing infrastructure system for Foundry deployments on customer-managed on-prem Kubernetes clusters, where Palantir has no direct access to the underlying hardware and the customer's IT team has a 4-hour response SLA for any manual intervention.

19.Tell me about a time you pushed back on a request from a customer or stakeholder because you believed the technical approach was wrong. How did you handle it, and what happened?

20.Describe a time you made a significant infrastructure decision without full information and it turned out to be wrong. What did you do when you realized it, and what would you change about how you made the decision?

21.Tell me about a time you had to coordinate a critical infrastructure change across multiple teams who had competing priorities and no shared deadline. How did you get alignment, and how long did it take?

22.You've just joined a team and discovered that a runbook everyone relies on is dangerously out of date — it describes infrastructure that no longer exists. No one owns it, and fixing it isn't in anyone's roadmap. What do you do?

23.Tell me about a time you suspected a system you owned had a reliability or security issue, but you had no concrete evidence yet — just a bad signal. How did you decide whether to escalate or investigate further, and what happened?

24.Describe a time you disagreed with a technical direction your team or organization had already committed to — a migration, an architectural choice, a vendor decision. What did you do, and how did it resolve?

25.Estimate how many CPU cores Palantir's Apollo system needs to manage software delivery across 10,000 environments simultaneously. Walk me through your assumptions.

26.A Foundry customer's data pipeline error rate jumped from 0.1% to 3% starting exactly at midnight UTC, but no code was deployed and no infrastructure alerts fired. Where do you start, and what's your first hypothesis?

27.Estimate the blast radius — in customer-hours of downtime — if Apollo's central orchestration service became unavailable for 4 hours during a peak deployment window. What assumptions drive your answer the most?

28.Design a build and test infrastructure for Gotham that can run a full regression suite on every pull request — but where the test data itself is classified and can never touch the CI pipeline's shared cloud runners. How do you structure this?

29.Palantir is expanding AIP to 500 new enterprise customers over the next 12 months. Estimate what the observability infrastructure — metrics, logs, traces — will cost per month at that scale, and identify the single biggest cost driver.

30.Design a global incident response coordination system for Palantir that can manage a simultaneous P1 across a commercial Foundry customer and a Gotham deployment — where the two response teams must never share incident details, tooling, or communication channels due to classification boundaries. How do you build one system that handles both?