Meritocracy Fellowship

A World-Changing Company Palantir builds the world’s leading software for data-driven decisions and operations. By bringing the right data to the people who need it, our platforms empower our partners to develop lifesaving drugs, forecast supply chain disruptions, locate missing children, and more. The Program We believe meritocracy is the operating system for execution: find ability wherever it exists, give people room to act, and judge them by the quality of what they do. The American university once advanced this vision extraordinarily well. At its best, it found talented individuals from every background, exposed them to challenging ideas, and sent them into the world sharper, more capable, and imbued with purpose. When it worked, it was extraordinary. Yet in recent decades, many of our finest institutions strayed from this calling. Admissions committees elevated other priorities. Classrooms rewarded conformity over honesty and rigor. Credentials replaced true capability. Cost became decoupled from value. We launched the Meritocracy Fellowship to recover that highest purpose: find exceptionally talented individuals, forge them intellectually, give them responsibility, and judge them by their achievements alone. Based purely on merit and academic excellence, graduating high school students will be invited to interview, and select applicants will receive a Meritocracy Fellowship. Those that excel will obtain offers to join Palantir full time. Skip the debt. Get the real education. Earn the Palantir degree. The Curriculum For five weeks, Fellows grapple with the ideas that shape our civilization. What is the West? Is it worth defending? In what ways is America exceptional within this broader context? And what is Palantir's mission in that context? Fellows read great works, visit institutions at the frontiers of knowledge and public life, and work alongside one another to build something real. This is the education that universities were designed to deliver: rigorous, Socratic, grounded in the texts and ideas that actually matter. Not a lecture hall. Not a curriculum designed by committee. A room full of people who are smarter than you, expecting you to hold your own. This initial period lays the intellectual foundation before Fellows join forward-deployed engineering or internal software teams. Fellows spend substantial time building in the first five weeks and learn from Palantirians working across engineering, product, security, deployment, and operations. Our most vital technologies cannot be created by those indifferent to their purpose. Today's challenges demand builders who are guided by conviction and a clear sense of mission. The Role Once Fellows join Palantir's development or forward deployed engineering teams, they are treated like any other Palantir software engineer: joining a team and working alongside customers onsite. Fellows are not given internship projects; they are given the responsibility of a full-time engineer. They learn the problem from the people who live it, build against real data, ship software, and iterate. The data is real. The stakes are real. The people depending on the outcome are real. In this role, the challenges you'll seek will require a curious and analytical approach, a sharp intuition for product, and a strong degree of user insight. You will be matched to roles based on your skills, interests, and experience. The only factor that determines whether you advance here is outcomes. What We Value: High degree of agency, autonomy, and maturity Extraordinary ability to confront open-ended and ambiguous problems Adaptive and introspective; willing to learn, guide, lead, and follow Ability to communicate and collaborate effectively with a variety of individuals, including engineers, users, and non-technical team members Willingness to learn proactively, make decisions independently, and ask questions when stuck Experience with programming, scripting, or statistical packages (e.g. Python, R, Matlab, SQL) What We Require: High school certificate of graduation at the start of the internship Candidates cannot be enrolled in an accredited U.S. university Candidates cannot have previously earned an undergraduate degree Spending fall 2027 (August - December) at Palantir exclusively; candidates cannot simultaneously be enrolled in university classes