Backend Software Engineer - Infrastructure

Salary: £54,000 - 94,000 per year

Requirements:

• Engineering background in Computer Science, Mathematics, Software Engineering, Physics, or a similar field.
• Strong coding skills with demonstrated proficiency in programming languages such as Java, C++, Python, Rust, or similar languages.
• Familiarity with storage and data processing systems, cloud infrastructure, and other technical tools.
• Strong written and verbal communication skills.
• Ability to iterate quickly with teammates, incorporate feedback, and maintain a high bar for quality.
• Demonstrated ability to collaborate and empathise with a variety of individuals.
• Ability to learn new technology and concepts, even without in-depth experience.
• Experience developing and managing highly available distributed systems is beneficial, but not required.
• Bias towards quality and thoughtful consideration of edge cases.
• Ability to build solutions and APIs with users in mind while maintaining a high engineering bar.
• UK Security clearance, or eligibility and willingness to obtain it, is beneficial but not necessary.

Responsibilities:

• Build software at scale to transform how organizations use data.
• Collaborate closely with technical and non-technical teammates to understand customer problems and build products that solve them.
• Work throughout the product lifecycle, from idea generation and design to prototyping and production delivery.
• Move across teams to share context, skills, and experience.
• Contribute high-quality code to underpin Palantir Foundry and Gotham with performant, secure, and scalable building blocks.
• Build foundational capabilities that power products used by research scientists, aerospace engineers, intelligence analysts, and economic forecasters.
• Develop reliable, performant, and scalable systems.
• Design robust APIs and primitives.
• Build a performant search and indexing ecosystem for complex granularly permissioned data.
• Contribute to open-source data processing libraries and integrate the latest innovations to achieve performance gains.
• Build distributed systems that power large-scale compute workloads.
• Orchestrate and efficiently schedule hundreds of thousands of containers every hour.
• Design architecture and opinionated APIs to keep application developers on the happy path.
• Build tracing and performance observability in high-scale distributed microservice architectures.
• Build reliable, performant, and scalable systems for storage, auth, or asset serving.
• Automate the deployment, management, and operations of complex distributed systems such as Cassandra, Elasticsearch, and Kafka across different environments.
• For Frontline assignments, work directly with customers, lead end-to-end execution of high-stakes projects, discuss architecture, build custom web apps, conduct workshops with users, and strategize with customer executives.

Technologies:

• Backend
• Cloud
• Cassandra
• ElasticSearch
• Embedded
• Support
• Java
• Kafka
• Python
• Rust
• Security
• Web
• CTO
• DevOps
• Gradle
• Kubernetes
• Spark

More:

We are Palantir, and we build software that supports data-driven decisions and operations across important institutions in the public and private sector. This Backend Software Engineer role is based in London, United Kingdom, and is offered as a full-time hybrid position. Our teams are small, autonomous, and collaborative, and we encourage movement across teams so engineers can learn different technologies and aspects of each product. We also offer the opportunity for some engineers to take part in Frontline, a short-term embedded customer program that provides firsthand insight into how our products are used. We value in-person work for connectivity and innovation, while many teams offer hybrid options. We also support health and well-being, growth opportunities, and an accessible hiring process.

last updated 36 week of 2026