Senior Software Engineer, Substrate in City of Westminster

Substrate is the team responsible for Palantir's core production infrastructure — 100s of K8s clusters — from on‑prem to the major cloud hyperscalers, whether they are internet‑connected or air‑gapped, small hardware footprint or large. As a Senior Software Engineer on Substrate, you will design and build Palantir's managed Kubernetes product offerings across all these environments. You and your team will be responsible for bootstrapping and operating the entire fleet of K8s clusters with zero manual steps by building industry‑leading tooling and contributing to core CNCF components. You will also be responsible for ensuring scale, stability and security across a matrix of compliance regimes and hosting infrastructure types. Your team culture emphasizes engineering rigor and operational excellence at scale. This means issues in production should be pre‑empted and deeply root‑caused, and investments in automation and self‑healing systems are key. If you’re excited about infrastructure at scale and working with Kubernetes, this is the right role for you.

Core Responsibilities

• Deliver a container runtime to challenging new environment types — new clouds, on premise, edge devices.
• Build automation and establish standards for operating K8s securely at scale with zero manual operations overhead.
• Drive innovation through adoption of novel K8s features and CNCF tools, making upstream contributions as needed.
• Design the next generation of Palantir’s infrastructure through a deep understanding of internal systems and CNCF standards.
• Systems programming experience with strong proficiency in Go, C/C++ or equivalent.
• Working knowledge or hands‑on experience of infrastructure automation tools such as Terraform, Ansible, Puppet or K8s operators, and competent coding in Go, Java, or equivalent for the purposes of automation or scripting.
• Deep familiarity with hardware and OS configurations, diagnostic tooling, networking nuts and bolts.
• Deep familiarity with containers (Docker) and orchestration (Kubernetes) at scale.
• Experience working with a cloud provider (AWS/Azure/GCE), or sys‑admin/SRE experience in data centers.
• Experience designing, building, and operating high‑scale observability or infrastructure systems.
• Working knowledge of networking fundamentals, experience with CNIs or cloud networking infrastructure preferred.
• 4+ years of professional software development experience on core infrastructure with emphasis on operational excellence.
• 2+ years of experience contributing to the system design or architecture (design patterns, reliability and scaling) of new and existing systems.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or equivalent.

About Palantir

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.

Life at Palantir

We want every Palantirian to achieve their best outcomes, celebrating each individual’s strengths, skills, and interests from your first interview to long‑term growth, rather than relying on traditional career ladders. Paying attention to the needs of our community enables us to optimize our opportunities to grow and helps ensure many pathways to success at Palantir. We invest in health and well‑being across all areas of our team’s lives, fostering a culture of collaboration and innovation. In‑person work is encouraged to maximize creative outcomes, though many teams offer hybrid options (WFH one–two days a week). Some roles allow remote work on an exceptional basis, requiring employees to work from their city or country of employment. We are committed to making the application and hiring process accessible to everyone and will provide reasonable accommodation for those living with a disability. If you need an accommodation for the application or hiring process, please reach out and let us know how we can help.