Ukrainian Artur Kachur, who studied in the US and worked in the investment sector, joined the American technology company Palantir as a Deployment Strategist. He spoke about the specifics of the selection, technical interviews based on unknown programming languages, creating his own AI demo during the Los Angeles fires, and the company’s internal culture.
Ukrainian Artur Kachur, who studied in the US and worked in the investment sector, joined the American technology company Palantir as a Deployment Strategist. He spoke about the specifics of the selection, technical interviews based on unknown programming languages, creating his own AI demo during the Los Angeles fires, and the company’s internal culture.
As Kachur told DOU, the hiring process at Palantir typically starts with a standard screening with a recruiter and a conversation with a current specialist in a similar position. Since there is little public information about the role, such a call helps candidates understand the specifics of the project structure and career growth in the absence of the usual corporate ladder of titles.
The next stage — Virtual Onsite — lasts about two hours and consists of several consecutive interviews with different specialists. This is where the tasks begin, which are as close as possible to the real challenges of the position.
At the first technical interview, Artur received a dataset and a tool he had never worked with before.
«I was given a data set and asked to work with a programming language that I had never encountered before. Now I understand that it was a relatively simple variation of SQL or another language for working with data, but the idea itself was not to test knowledge of a specific tool. The interview was structured to put the candidate in a new situation,» the specialist recalls.
The second interview focused on problem decomposition and solution structuring. The candidate was asked open-ended questions like «How can I help an airline increase passenger numbers over the course of a year?» The challenge was to engage in a two-way dialogue, ask the right questions, and identify key factors from the data provided.
Despite his technical and business academic background, Artur Kachur didn’t do engineering work every day, so he failed his first technical interview on the first try. However, he decided not to give up and began to independently study the company’s open platform, take training courses, and analyze ready-made user solutions.
In January 2025, when large-scale fires were raging in Los Angeles, Arthur created his own demo solution for insurance companies. Its essence was that the user uploaded photos of his damaged house, and artificial intelligence analyzed the images, determined the extent of the damage and compared them with the insurance policy to calculate coverage. The demo, created on open data, was shown to the person responsible for hiring. This allowed Arthur to bypass repeated technical interviews and go straight to the final conversation with the manager.
According to the specialist, onboarding at Palantir is built on practice: newcomers are divided into teams of 4–5 people and immediately given tasks without long theoretical lectures or presentations. After just a week of work, Artur received his first client. Teams at the company are usually small and flexible — most often it is a tandem with a Deployment Strategist and a Forward Deployed Software Engineer, who jointly communicate with customers.
Palantir employs a large number of Ukrainians, most of whom are concentrated in the European office in London, but there are also specialists in New York. The company’s compensation package is standard for the American market, and the level of salaries is comparable to Google. A significant part of the remuneration is made up of RSU (Restricted Stock Units) with a one-year vesting period. Employees are also offered health insurance, gym compensation, and three meals a day in the office.
Recall that Palantir, founded by PayPal and Stanford alumni, has become the main provider of AI solutions for the Ukrainian army and government. Their platforms help to plan routes to bypass enemy air defenses, analyze the results of air strikes, and optimize the reconstruction of regions. dev.ua told how the Palantir digital ecosystem works, what is already being used for attacks on the Russian Federation and Iran, and what hidden threats cooperation with the developer poses.
