Decompose: design a system to coordinate disaster response for a city.
The most open-ended prompt in the Palantir canon, no scale given, no user given, no disaster given. What separates passing answers is one design assumption about the data that almost nobody states out loud.
Updated Sep 2026 · Grounded in real Forward Deployed Engineer interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
The most open-ended prompt in the Palantir canon, no scale given, no user given, no disaster given. What separates passing answers is one design assumption about the data that almost nobody states out loud.
Lead with where the obvious approach breaks, because that is the judgment they are screening for — most candidates jump straight to the happy path and lose the room.
Then walk the failure back through the pipeline in order, naming the one metric the customer's exec sponsor actually cares about before you propose the fix.