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Salary: USD 135,000 - 200,000 / annual
Palantir is hiring a Senior Software Engineer to work on Query Engines, a critical component of Foundry, the company's data-driven decision and operations platform. You will design and build backend systems at scale that transform how organizations use data.
In this role, you will:
- Design and implement query planning and optimization capabilities that turn complex computations into efficient execution plans
- Extend execution engines with new capabilities and improve query operators, parallelism, memory management, and data movement
- Develop Foundry's Iceberg catalog and engine integrations, including table metadata, transactions, and efficient reads and writes
- Build shared transformation semantics and execution interfaces for workloads across Foundry's products and platform services
- Improve incremental processing so pipelines can reuse previous results and process new data efficiently while preserving correctness
- Evaluate and integrate advances in open-source data systems, validating their behavior and performance against real-world workloads
- Investigate correctness and performance issues across planning, execution, and storage, and build tests and benchmarks that prevent regressions
- Work with product teams and customers to translate operational needs into engine capabilities that integrate with Foundry's security, data management, and build infrastructure
You will work with technologies including Java, Scala, Rust, and Python; Apache Spark, DataFusion, Comet, and Velox; Apache Iceberg, Arrow, and Parquet; and industry-standard build tooling.
The team values ownership and a high bar for correctness, curiosity about data systems, strong debugging skills, practical performance optimization, and the ability to collaborate across teams. You may have the opportunity to participate in Frontline, an exclusive program where you are embedded with customers to gain firsthand insight into how products are used and the challenges they face.
REQUIREMENTS:
- 4+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating production systems
- Engineering background in Computer Science, Mathematics, Software Engineering, Physics, or equivalent practical experience
- Strong coding skills with demonstrated proficiency in Java, Rust, Scala, or C++
- Experience developing database engines, distributed data processing systems, storage systems, or comparable infrastructure, with depth in query planning, execution, or performance optimization
- Strong foundations in algorithms, data structures, and concurrency, with experience diagnosing correctness and performance problems in complex systems
- Strong written and verbal communication skills and ability to work effectively across teams
