Meritocracy Fellowship Internship

The Program

Palantir builds the world's leading software for data-driven decisions and operations. Its platforms help partners develop lifesaving drugs, forecast supply chain disruptions, locate missing children, and more.

The Meritocracy Fellowship is built on the idea that ability can be found anywhere, people should be given room to act, and they should be judged by the quality of their work. Based purely on merit and academic excellence, graduating high school students will be invited to interview, and selected applicants will receive a Meritocracy Fellowship. Those who excel will receive offers to join Palantir full time.

The Curriculum

For five weeks, Fellows study the ideas that shape our civilization, including what the West is, whether it is worth defending, what makes America exceptional, and what Palantir's mission means in that context.

Fellows read major works, visit institutions at the frontiers of knowledge and public life, and work together on a shared project. The program is rigorous and Socratic, grounded in the texts and ideas that matter. This initial period lays the intellectual foundation before Fellows join forward-deployed engineering or internal software teams, and they spend substantial time building while learning from Palantirians across engineering, product, security, deployment, and operations.

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 given the responsibility of a full-time engineer rather than internship projects. They learn the problem from the people who live it, build against real data, ship software, and iterate.

Fellows will be matched to roles based on their skills, interests, and experience. The only factor that determines advancement is outcomes.

What We Value

• High degree of agency, autonomy, and maturity
• Ability to confront open-ended and ambiguous problems
• Adaptive and introspective, willing to learn, guide, lead, and follow
• Ability to communicate and collaborate with 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
• Not enrolled in an accredited U.S. university
• Has not previously earned an undergraduate degree
• Spending fall 2027 (August to December) at Palantir exclusively, without university classes at the same time