Backend Software Engineer - Infrastructure, Foundations

Palantir is hiring a Backend Software Engineer - Infrastructure, Foundations in London, United Kingdom. Level rates it ; you can apply on Palantir.

Level's read on this job

Little AI ●○○○ is how Level rates this software engineer role: aI is not part of the work.
Palantir has 298 other open roles on Level.

AI in this role

A World-Changing Company Palantir builds the world’s leading software for data-driven decisions and operations. By bringing the right data to the people who need it, our platforms empower our partners to develop lifesaving drugs, forecast supply chain disruptions, locate missing children, and more.
The Role Backend Software Engineers at Palantir build software at scale to transform how organisations use data. Our Software Engineers are involved throughout the product lifecycle, from idea generation, design, prototyping, and production delivery. You will collaborate closely with technical and non-technical teammates to understand our customers' problems and build products that solve them. We encourage movement across teams to share context, skills, and experience, so you'll learn about many different technologies and aspects of each product. Engineers work autonomously and make decisions independently, within a community that will support and challenge you as you grow and develop, becoming a strong technical contributor and engineering leader. Our Product Development organisation is made up of small teams of Software Engineers. Each team focuses on a specific aspect of a product. Our infrastructure teams are responsible for the lowest layers of our software stack, often focused on database technologies, distributed systems, large scale data systems, security, and application infrastructure. As a Software Engineer on infrastructure, you'll contribute high-quality code to underpin Palantir Foundry and Gotham with performant, secure, and scalable building blocks, enabling products deployed to the most important institutions in the public and private sector. You'll build the foundational capabilities that power our products used by research scientists, aerospace engineers, intelligence analysts, and economic forecasters, in countries around the world. We’re hiring engineers who are passionate about solving real-world problems and empowering both developers and end-users to work optimally. If you’re motivated to develop reliable, performant, and scalable systems, and to design robust APIs and primitives, this role offers the opportunity to make a significant impact on our products and the people who use them.

Core Responsibilities

Building a performant search and indexing ecosystem for complex granularly permissioned data
Contributing to open-source data processing libraries, integrating the latest innovations to achieve performance gains
Building the distributed systems that power large scale compute workloads, orchestrating and efficiently scheduling hundreds of thousands of containers every hour
Designing architecture and opinionated APIs to keep application developers on the happy path
Tracing and performance observability in high scale distributed microservice architectures
Building reliant, performant, and scalable systems for storage, auth, or asset serving to enable other product teams to build robust applications without deep domain expertise in the underlying systems
Automating the deployment, management, and operations of complex distributed systems like Cassandra, Elasticsearch, Kafka, and more across different environments

Technologies We Use

Different backend languages, including Java, Rust, and Go
Open-source technologies like Cassandra, ElasticSearch, Spark, Kafka, Kubernetes, Flink
Industry-standard build tooling, including Gradle and GitHub

What We Value

Demonstrated ability to collaborate and empathise with a variety of individuals. Able to iterate with users and non-technical stakeholders and understand how technical decisions impact them.
Ability to learn new technology and concepts, even without in-depth experience. Experience developing and managing highly-available distributed systems is beneficial, but not required.
Bias towards quality and thoughtful about edge cases (“anything that can go wrong will go wrong”); writes code that is defensive against all possibilities.
Builds solutions and APIs with users in mind while maintaining a high engineering bar. Seeks to centralise and abstract complexity away from our users in order to expose simple, powerful APIs for consumers.
Active US Security clearance, or eligibility and willingness to obtain a US Security clearance is beneficial, but not necessary.

What We Require

Engineering background in Computer Science, Mathematics, Software Engineering, Physics or similar field
Strong coding skills with demonstrated proficiency in programming languages, such as Java, C++, Python, Rust, or similar languages
Familiarity with storage and data processing systems, cloud infrastructure, and other technical tools
Strong written and verbal communication skills and ability to iterate quickly with teammates, incorporating feedback and holding a high bar for quality

Life at Palantir We want every Palantirian to achieve their best outcomes, that’s why we celebrate individuals’ strengths, skills, and interests, from your first interview to your longterm growth, rather than rely on traditional career ladders. Paying attention to the needs of our community enables us to optimize our opportunities to grow and helps ensure many pathways to success at Palantir. Promoting health and well-being across all areas of Palantirians’ lives is just one of the ways we’re investing in our community. Learn more at Life at Palantir and note that our offerings may vary by region. In keeping consistent with Palantir’s values and culture, we believe employees are “better together” and in-person work affords the opportunity for more creative outcomes. Therefore, we encourage employees to work from our offices to foster connectivity and innovation. Many teams do offer hybrid options (WFH a day or two a week), allowing our employees to strike the right trade-off for their personal productivity. Based on business need, there are a few roles that allow for “Remote” work on an exceptional basis. If you are applying for one of these roles, you must work from the city and or country in which you are employed. If the posting is specified as Onsite, you are required to work from an office. If you want to empower the world's most important institutions, you belong here. Palantir values excellence regardless of background. We are committed to making the application and hiring process accessible to everyone and will provide a reasonable accommodation for those living with a disability. If you need an accommodation for the application or hiring process, please reach out and let us know how we can help. Please note that you will never be asked to submit a payment or share financial information to participate in our interview process. If you suspect that you've been contacted by a scammer, we recommend you cease all communication with the individual and consider reporting them to the relevant authorities, such as the US FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3).

How we rate this

Backend Software Engineer - Infrastructure, Foundations at Palantir rates 16 out of 100 for how much of the daily work is AI. That makes it Little AI (AI Level 1 of 4). The level is about AI in the job, not seniority.

Classification

Little AI. AI is not part of the work.

●●●● Builds AI80 to 100
●●●○ Works on AI60 to 79
●●○○ Uses AI40 to 59
●○○○ Little AI0 to 39

Levels come from how often the tools, models and workflows of the role are named in the posting itself. Read the description and count the AI tools, models and workflows it names.

Key facts

Backend Software Engineer - Infrastructure, Foundations is an open job at Palantir.
Level rates this role AI Level 1 of 4: Little AI.
The role is based in London, United Kingdom.
The job was posted on March 26, 2026.
Applications are handled by Palantir. Apply on Palantir