Matt Welsh

I am looking forward to the next set of hires that decided to apply to Palantir after reading your post. Please don’t delete it Paul. We work here in direct response to this world view and do not seek its blessing. Our work with DHS, which has spanned the Obama, Trump, and Biden administrations, began in the immediate response to the murder of Agent Jaime Zapata by the Zetas in an effort dubbed Operation Fallen Hero. I believe Agent Zapata and those who have taken the thankless jobs of protecting our way of life by risking their own deserve the very best tools we can possibly give them. When people are alive because of what you built, and others are dead because what you built was not yet good enough, you develop a very different perspective on the meaning of your work. Paul’s perspective is very similar to that of Google in 2018 when it walked away from Project Maven; the DoD’s flagship program to bring AI to warfighting. Google embraced the luxury belief that our way of life is given and that, as the best and brightest of us, they were above wrestling with the hard questions in the muck and mire of how to continue to ensure their privilege. It was much easier to sell ads. Like our DHS agents, I also believe our soldiers deserve the very best tools as they risk their lives to protect mine. The sentiment expressed below, that engineers have the luxury of working on other cool stuff so should not sully themselves with the functions that provide the bedrock of society, is something I thought we had largely left behind. Now I have a greater understanding of one of its root causes. For those of you who are interested in joining, we are not looking for partisans at Palantir. Our mission spans administrations and political climates and our culture is one of constant disagreement. We do collectively believe that competence in our government is a prerequisite for our way of life and assume the burden of falling forward on the goal to provide it every single day. We are in a situation today where no matter the immigration policy the citizenry votes for, it cannot be executed; reality has largely been divorced from the statutes for decades now. This is first a question of competence, not politics. If the electorate cannot steer the execution of our government because the government cannot execute, our institutions lose all credibility, and the risk moves from an X debate to a much more fundamental one. We work to attach the steering wheel to the car and revitalize the institutions our societal fabric depends upon. We are looking for people who read something like this post and think it is crazy to demonize working towards a more effective government. In order to understand if Palantir is for you, I encourage you to do your research. Read Karp’s book “The Technological Republic.” The book eviscerates the vapidity of silicon valley expressed here but also explores the positive thesis of what are the principles that actually matter when wrestling with the questions of how to empower the functioning of the state. It is perhaps the most important debate we should be having and Karp has been the leader of that conversation, so out in the open about it the book is an NYT Bestseller. I’d also encourage you to read The First Breakfast blog series that Shyam has championed; I think it is one of the foremost examples of impactful, non-partisan, civic engagement that exists in our country right now. We are very open about our views and how deeply they are reasoned if you care to read them. We hire believers. Not in the sense of homogeneity of belief but in the intrinsic capacity to believe in something bigger than yourself. Belief is required because 1) our work is very, very hard and 2) you should expect to weather attacks like this all the time; from all sides of the political aisle. In order to stand out, build something with our software that you believein and bring it to your interview. The only way to counter these bullies is not to argue but to build. Our work is authentically complicated. We protected the lives of special operators during failed wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, we were the backbone of Operation Warpspeed to accelerate vaccines during Covid, we were the coordinating backbone of the Afghan withdrawal, we have enabled David to resist Goliath in Ukraine. These, and many, many other efforts too numerous to list here have been necessarily intertwined with heated political debates about the worthiness of engaging in these effort at all. My politics have not agreed with many of the policies our software has enabled. But through all of them I have held the steadfast belief that if our government institutions are not competent, politics does not matter. That is something I believe. So if you believe that engaging with the problem of 100,000 fentanyl deaths a year, stopping human trafficking, or merely in reconnecting the laws our elected representatives create with the reality of what is implemented we believe you aren’t a bad person. If you think that “building things people want” is all there is to life I wish you all the best. There is a place for you in the society we will protect on your behalf. If you are willing to engage with the messy, messy process of “building things the people need” then you may have a home at Palantir.