A WORLD-CHANGING COMPANY
At
Palantir, we’re passionate about building software that solves
problems. We partner with the most important institutions in the world
to transform how they use data and technology. Our software has been
used to stop terrorist attacks, discover new medicines, gain an edge in
global financial markets, and more. If these types of projects excite
you, we'd love for you to join us.
THE ROLE
- Infrastructure
Quality Engineers are responsible for ensuring that we develop and
deploy first-class products to customers around the world.
Infrastructure Quality Engineers are focused on delivering product
outcomes. It’s our responsibility to ask, “does the product solve the
most valuable problem?” and “how do we ship the product more quickly and
easily?” To answer these questions, we work directly with our customers
as well as our Forward Deployed Software Engineers. We observe and
experience the pain of deploying and using software firsthand, and
partner with Product Designers, Software Developers, Product Managers,
and many other teams to fix found issues.
- Our focus is the
quality of our products. We’re constantly on the search for pain and
friction points in both the actual product and our software development
process. As Infrastructure Quality Engineers, we approach quality
holistically, doing everything from performance benchmarking,
automation, and debugging to release management, user research, paper
prototyping, and feature testing. Some of the things IQEs have done in
the past year include:
- Rebuilding a production system to ship an order of magnitude performance and scale improvement
- Architecturally advising on proposed products in new customer verticals
- Running weekly releases for live customer systems
-
Mapping out the growth trajectory of a large product ecosystem and
working with a set of teams to invest in the right quality strategies
that build for the future
- Advising and consulting on a new data visualization layer for a set of our customers
- Responding to, debugging, and fixing exigent issues for customers located around the world
- Traveling around the globe to deploy new products
- Our
job is not to build the airplane — it’s to make sure all of the pieces
fit together, that the ride is smooth, safe, and enjoyable for everyone
on board, and that the plane stays in the air (which we think is pretty
important). When the pieces don’t align or the plane isn’t safe, we aim
to understand, prioritize, and fix the problems. We are product
expediters who make sure our customers are getting the most valuable
product for their unique needs on time and to spec.
- We’re big
believers that coding 100% of the time is not the only fulfilling career
path in software development (and several of us had to take a leap of
faith to realize that). We are people who like to work with everything —
particularly large systems — and are comfortable working in chaotic
environments to deliver epic outcomes. One of our favorite sayings is
“Let chaos reign, then rein in chaos.”
RESPONSIBILITIES
- Drive software architecture discussions and decisions
- Write automation code and develop automation frameworks
- Participate in every stage of the product life cycle
- Design and execute test cases using functional requirements
- Find, understand, and debug product issues
- Work
with Software Developers, Product Designers, Forward Deployed Software
Engineers, Product Managers, and others to ship high quality releases
- Deploy to the field to get at the root of the problem (as needed and desired)
WHAT WE LOOK FOR
- Ability to thrive in a fast-moving, chaotic environment with ad hoc objectives
- Comfortable exploring the unknown
- Excellent teamwork, independent decision making, and communication skills
- Analytical thinking, creative problem-solving, and troubleshooting skills with great attention to detail
- Ability to think creatively to define product and customer needs
- Aptitude for learning technical concepts, skills, and systems quickly
PREFERRED
- BS in Engineering, Computer Science, Applied Mathematics, Physics, or a related field
- Experience
working with complex systems (software, biological, mechanical, etc.)
and the desire and ability to understand them in detail
- Experience working in a software development environment
- Strong scripting abilities
- Experience working in Java, C++, C, Go, Scala, Python, Bash, or Javascript
- Firm grasp of testing methodologies, preferably backend and scale testing
