Background: I have a CS degree, but have worked as interaction designer for 10 years. My first contact from Palantir was an email from one of their recruiters that was a bit odd because it was looking for "highly technical individuals" and had some bullet points about my CS degree, and some recognition as a student (placing in ACM competition etc). I ignored this since I get a lot of emails from recruiters looking to fill engineering positions :-( Then I got a follow up a month later that was commenting more on my design capability. I looked up their website and was blown away with the product demo, and I saw they were hiring Product Designers in NYC so I emailed back to arrange a phone interview. The first disappointment was that although advertising NYC positions, it was explained they are looking for people to be based from Palo Alto office initially, before moving to a regional office. Next were a bunch of questions that I think I might have been able to answer, but only on a whiteboard/pen paper not off the top of my head over the phone: 1. What is minimum number of guesses needed to find a number between 1 and 1,000 (when with each guess you're told if the target is higher or lower) (I guessed 10+1 #fail) 2. What is significance of 32^2 (I answered I have no idea, but guessed it was something to do with memory?) 3. What is a stack? (the only one I could answer confidently) 4. What is the optimal performance to expect from a hashing algorithm with no collisions? (I said O-log-n with the disclaimer that I was just guessing and hadn't really thought about computation complexity for over a decade). 5. Describe how given two lists of random numbers how to most efficiently find a list of duplicates. ...at this point it sounded a bit like the recruiter was getting fed up with my guessing so I excused myself by saying I didn't think I had the skills they were looking for :-( Overall the recruiter I spoke to was very nice, and prompt at arranging the interview (entire process from first contact to interview was less than 24hours) which I appreciate. After the interview I jumped on Glassdoor to see if anyone else had posted a similar interview experience for a product design position, but they were quite different so it's possible that I wasn't being interviewed for a product design position at all, or possibly the internal expectation they have for product designer doesn't match what I'm familiar with. I emailed back to clarify but haven't heard back!

Still interviewing — completed a 2-hour take-home interaction design challenge with detailed prompt and instructions. Next is a 45-minute portfolio review focused on design skills, interests, and alignment with their work — mostly digging into the 'whys,' values, and systems thinking.