Palantir's CTO on 2am calls and 100,000 upgrades a week

Now appears to be a good time to work at Palantir, the tech firm that once had a reputation for tempting away quants and juniors from banks. As other tech firms struggle in an uncertain economic period, Palantir's stock price has risen 43% since March. Pay isn't thought to be stellar but, in a talk published this week with Stanford University, Palantir's CTO Shyam Sankar declared that it can be a great place for personal development, especially as a graduate.

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Palantir has 3,936 employees according to its latest annual report for 2024. Sankar said Palantir has ~5,000 microservices, and that these "engineers will own different surface area [of] across a thousand production environments." Owning a product comes with challenges; Sankar said Palantir makes "100,000 upgrades across that infrastructure a week" and, if something goes wrong, "you're going to have to get paged at 2am to deal with it." Ah.

The people receiving 2am calls might be younger staff or even recent graduates. Palantir said in its annual report that the bulk of its technical hires come via campus recruiting, and that "successful entry-level hires are often quickly advanced and rewarded with significant responsibilities."

Palantir went public in 2018, which Sankar described as a "dislocating experience." He said that life now is "incredibly different," but denied that the culture had changed because of it. Before its IPO, Sankar said working at Palantir was like "getting kicked in the teeth," as everyone expected the company to fail; current hires are still working hard but might feel a bit safer in their roles.

Newer staff also don't have to deal with a monolithic codebase. Sankar said that in Palantir's "dark ages," engineers had to "write code in a way that's going to run across [the] heterogeneity" of its 1,000 different environments. Today, it automates DevOps, security and deployment through its Apollo platform.

Reviews on jobs forum Blind say that working at Palantir is still intense despite the assistance from AI. One engineer last year said he was "often expected to work 10-12 hour days." Long hours aren't a prerequisite, though; another engineer said in a review this year that you can have a "decent work-life balance as long as you get your work done." The company's political stance has also been a dealbreaker for staff; CEO Alex Karp said Palantir has lost employees over its support for Israel over Palestine.

Palantir staff also make decent money. Its annual report revealed that stock-based compensation per head alone was $175k in 2024. It's not clear how much cash compensation its staff receive, but its UK staff received a less impressive $103k per head in 'salaries and wages' according to most recent accounts via Companies House. 

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