I was contacted via email from a recruiter. Said they liked my portfolio, wanted to speak to me, yada, yada and so on. Ended up talking to another product designer over the phone for about 20 minutes. Talked a little about my work, process, etc. The next day I was asked to fly out to Palo Alto (on their tab) to meet the team. The day of the interview I met with three of their designers whom two of them referred to themselves as the "Lead Designer". I met with two designers before lunch and went to lunch with them (along with another candidate) after the interviews with them. We had sushi. Interviews consisted of going over my portfolio and doing a design challenge on the white board. Fairly easy. After lunch the herd of Palantir hopefuls gathered around a palantir dev who demoed the product. Afterwards another employee comes in with a clipboard and calls some people out, me being one of them. I assume the people who didn't get called on got let go. I go on to take my last interview with an older fellow who was the lead designer and go through another design challenge on the whiteboard. This guy was more of the "seasoned" designers there, a whopping year and a half. I have to say, this guy really liked to talk about himself, how he worked on Star Wars, yada, yada. I will say I didn't get the job and something tells me it was because of this guy. But I will never know.
I think as the design team goes, they feel like they can be choosey at this point. The team of 6, whom is expected to grow to 21 this year is really looking for something very particular in each person. Not sure what it is really. I will say that two of the guys I interviewed with seemed like people I normally would hang out and get along with but they are looking for something else I guess. And if they want to talk about design, I am not impressed with any of their work, of which I really had to scour the web for them during research. Again, they are looking for people very specific and it wasn't me. Good luck to the recruiters who have to fill that 21 person quota. On a more positive note, the place was very laid back, the people were great and it was overall a good experience. It's a great product that actually will do good in the future, both for society and profitability.