Software Engineer – Query Engines

Overview

In this role, you will design and optimize the data processing stack that powers Palantir Foundry, extending engines and table formats for large-scale workloads. You’ll work on query planning, execution, and data movement to deliver correct, high-performance systems used across products. Your work helps hospitals, supply chains, and other critical operations run more efficiently and safely. The role combines deep systems engineering with real-world impact, offering opportunities to influence both open-source components and enterprise integrations.

Pay / Benefits

• hybrid work options
• remote work on exceptional basis
• reasonable accommodation for disability

Responsibilities

• Design and implement query planning and optimization to derive efficient execution plans
• Extend execution engines with new capabilities, improving operators, parallelism, memory management, and data movement
• Develop Foundry’s Iceberg catalog and engine integrations (table metadata, transactions, reads/writes)
• Build shared transformation semantics and execution interfaces for Foundry workloads
• Improve incremental processing to reuse results while preserving correctness
• Evaluate and integrate open-source data systems, validating behavior and performance with real workloads
• Investigate correctness and performance issues across planning, execution, storage; build tests and benchmarks
• Collaborate with product teams and customers to align engine capabilities with security, data management, and build infra

Key requirements

• 4+ years of professional software engineering experience
• Engineering background in CS, Mathematics, Software Engineering, Physics, or equivalent experience
• Proficiency in Java, Rust, Scala, or C++
• Experience with database engines, distributed data processing systems, storage systems; depth in planning, execution, or performance optimization
• Strong foundations in algorithms, data structures, concurrency; ability to diagnose complex system issues
• Strong written and verbal communication and cross-team collaboration skills

• Ownership mindset with focus on correctness
• Curiosity about how data systems work across stack
• Strong debugging skills across languages and layers
• Java
• Rust
• Scala

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