About me: Studying CS. Goals: Maximize learning for summer internship. I want to start my own company down the line so am looking to get the technical and leadership skills, network and business acumen for that. I am also looking to maximize TC in the short and long term moving forward in terms of full time considerations. Offers for Summer 2020 Internship. ActionIQ Software Engineering (backend) New York. Palantir Software Engineering (Gotham) Palo Alto. Not FDE. Palantir offers a slightly higher compensation and better perks for the summer (covers rent, transportation, food etc). Current Thoughts: Conflicted. This is my first (and last) internship while at university and so the return offer would matter to me. Some people told me that I would learn more by being at a startup like ActionIQ since there is more to do and you get to adopt different roles when a company has ~100 employees total. On the other hand, Palantir probably has a more structured internship program and might be more organized due to that. The products themselves are similar in terms of data integration but the application areas are different. Product Maturity: Palantir's Gotham product has been built out more or less while ActionIQ's Customer Data Platform is still going for maturity. Reputation: Palantir might be a better name to have on my resume in terms of transitioning to roles at companies like Facebook or Google later while ActionIQ is a startup that has been around for 4.5 years and maybe is not that well known. Payoff: I do intend to apply for other fulltime roles next year. Both companies have some potential of IPOs if I commit to them long term. In case of Palantir, I later want to transition and work on Foundry at the New York Office for fulltime and was told by my hiring manager that this transition should be doable. I am also an international and both companies are willing to sponsor me for future fulltime work if I get a return offer though I do feel Palantir may have an edge here since they have a mobility team dedicated to this. Please feel free to add your thoughts and correct me if I am wrong on my perception of things here. AMA as well.
Did Palantir ask you system design for the internship interviews
I’ve heard great things about ActionIQ. If you like systems, infrastructure, distributed systems, go for it. One of the founders is a PMC of HBase
I did some research on the founders but didn't come across that. While I do feel that infrastructure focus is common to both of them, I might get greater exposure since ActionIQ is building things out right now. How did you come across ActionIQ?
I went to their onsite and failed lol