Two customer lists, millions of rows, no shared key, names and emails almost match. Dedupe and merge them.
Palantir's home turf: entity resolution disguised as a dedupe task. The naive O(n²) comparison is the trap, blocking, match scoring, transitive closure, and the golden-record question are where the interview actually happens.
Updated Sep 2026 · Grounded in real Forward Deployed Engineer interview loops and written to a senior-engineer editorial bar.
Palantir's home turf: entity resolution disguised as a dedupe task. The naive O(n²) comparison is the trap, blocking, match scoring, transitive closure, and the golden-record question are where the interview actually happens.
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.
