Product Designer at Palantir

For a few months in late 2015, I worked as a Product Design intern at Palantir's Palo Alto HQ. I was part of a small team tasked with designing an anti-fraud focused pilot project. It was my first purely design-focused role and helped kickstart my career in Product Design.

The project I was working on consisted of three key parts. The first was an object-node graphing system called Graph View which built on the core visualisation techniques of their flagship product, Gotham. Isolated subsets of data from Graph View were brought into a relative, time-based visualisation system called Stacks.

Stacks helped show object frequency and positioning over time which could be used to find recurring patterns. The level of granularity required for most cases meant we needed a library that didn't use a bezier curve to simplify things and allowed for dynamic scaling of time range.

The last part was an Object Viewer — an inspector for individual or small groups objects. It showed the object's properties with varying visualisation based on property type — string, pointer, geolocation, etc. It also listed that object's relationships to other important items. By doing this, you were able to inspect a particular object in detail then traverse its relationships.

I was also able to contribute a bit to their internal design system (now open-source) called Blueprint.

Palantir is one of the most inspiring companies I've worked with. I learnt so much from their design team and was able to work on something that really impacted people's lives. Hopefully I can work with them again one day.