Where it comes from
- Published by PalantirSource 1Apply: Forward Deployed Software Engineer, New Grad - Commercial (New York, NY) - Palantir on LeverPublisherPalantir Technologies (Lever)Source typecompany job posting More Palantir questions The Palantir interview guide
How to answer
The word that matters is “showed”. The strongest story is one where you watched someone use your work, or saw what they did instead, and that behavior broke an assumption your design rested on. One written prompt is close: when we read it, the application for Palantir’s New York new-grad (Commercial) role asked for a time you changed your mind about something, in 150 words at most. Source 1Apply: Forward Deployed Software Engineer, New Grad - Commercial (New York, NY) - Palantir on LeverPublisherPalantir Technologies (Lever)Source typecompany job posting Keep a short written version ready too.
Five moves:
- The approach, and why it was reasonable. What you built, the evidence behind it, and the alternative you rejected.
- What you saw. A behavior, not an opinion: the query they typed, the spreadsheet they kept beside your tool, the step they skipped.
- The assumption it broke. One sentence: “I had assumed they would search in sentences; they searched by fault code.”
- How you checked it wasn’t one person. Logs, a second user, a count. This separates judgment from giving in to the last person you spoke to.
- What you built instead, what you kept, and who you told. Name what you threw away and what it cost, and how the person who asked for the original agreed to drop it.
Close with the habit it left you, such as watching two users work before writing the evaluation set.
Two traps. The first is a feature-request story: the customer asked, you built it, and no technical view changed. The second is defending the original design so long that the user’s evidence becomes a footnote. Colin Jarvis of OpenAI said on a South Park Commons panel in May 2026 that the best FDEs will tear a solution up and build something completely different when users do not use it. Source 2The Future of Forward Deployed Engineering | OpenAI, Ramp, Nominal, DatalandPublisherSouth Park Commons (YouTube)Source typerecorded talk or interview Show that, and keep the parts that worked.
Follow-ups
What the interviewer may ask next, once your first answer is on the table.
- Your evaluation set scored well and missed this entirely. Why, and what is in it now?
- What did you throw away, and how long had it taken to build?
- What would you have had to see to keep your original approach?
Where answers go wrong
- Tells a story where the customer asked for a feature and the speaker built it, so no technical view changed and the question goes unanswered.
- Switches approach on one user’s say-so and never checks whether the rest of the users work the same way.
- Treats the user’s behavior as misuse, adds training or a help tip, and keeps the design, so the evidence changed nothing.
Answer this in two minutes
Write the answer you would say out loud. The clock starts with your first word.
Illustrative answer about a fictional project
I was deploying a repair-knowledge assistant for an industrial equipment maker whose field technicians service packaging lines. The operations director asked for “a chat assistant over our manuals”, and I built one: retrieval over about 14,000 pages of manuals and service bulletins, a language model writing the answer, and a chat screen on the technicians’ tablets.