How to Ace a Systems Design Interview | Palantir
One interview that candidates often struggle with is the systems design interview. Even if you know your algorithms and write clean code, that code needs to run on a computer somewhere—and then things quickly get complicated. A truly unbelievable amount of complexity lies beneath something as simple as visiting Google in your browser. While most of that complexity is abstracted away from the end user, as a system designer you have to face it head on, and the more you can handle, the better.
We're looking for generalists with depth—people who are good at most things, and great at some. If systems design isn't your strength, that's okay, but you should at least be able to talk and reason competently about a complex system.
Read on to learn about what we're looking for and how you can prepare.
Focus on Thought Process
Nominally, this interview appears to require knowledge of systems and a knack for design—and it does. What makes it interesting, though, and sets it apart from a coding or an algorithms interview, is that whatever solution you come up with during the interview is just a side effect. What we actually care about is the thought process behind your design choices.
This reflects what actually working at Palantir is like. As engineers we have a tremendous amount of freedom. We aren't asked to implement fully-specced features. Instead we take ownership of open-ended problems, and it's our job to come up with the best solution to each. We need people we can trust to do the right thing without a lot of supervision—people who can own large projects and take them consistently in the right direction. Invariably, this means being able to communicate effectively with the people around you. Working on problems with huge scope isn't something you can do in a vacuum.
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