Junior bankers keep leaving for these particular jobs at Palantir

It may no longer serve artisanal pork products in its snack kitchen, but analytics company Palantir still has some sort of draw for junior bankers. One of its more recent hires is Daniel Wheller, a former JPMorgan analyst who joined this January.

Weller's escape to Palantir is notable because he wasn't working in a quant-type job at JPMorgan: he was a second year analyst in the UK coverage team. If Weller can move to Palantir, other young investment bankers can too.

Weller's job title at Palantir is 'deployment strategist.' As the company itself says, deployment strategists are client-facing - they work with Palantir's customers to establish the value the company can deliver by analyzing clients' data, and then they work with Palantir engineers to create a solution. Matt Grimm, a former Palantir deployment strategist, says the role doesn't require coding, but it does require a strong understanding of technology so that occupants can "explain the major functions" of the Palantir platform to clients.

Weller isn't the only ex-finance employee to be found on Palantir's deployment strategy team. There's also Sanne Bjartmar Hylta, who interned in sales and trading at Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley and Nordea before choosing to join Palantir as a graduate. There's Mati Staniszewski who worked at Blackrock (on the Aladdin tech platform), Theo Bell, a former electronic trader at Goldman Sachs, and Ravi Madlani, an ex-trader at Deutsche Bank (plus, undoubtedly, many others).

Some of ex-bankers at Palantir have banks as clients (this is undoubtedly why Palantir hires them in the first place). Bell, for example, is a now specialized in devising solutions that help banks monitor what traders are up to. Palantir is known to be deploying its technologies at Credit Suisse, where it's reportedly looking at activities like cell phone usage and door swipes to identify aberrations that could indicate bad behaviour on the trading floor.

In 2017 (the last year for which accounts are available), Palantir paid its average UK employee £220k ($281k) per head. It also increased the number of people it employed by 35% to 343. 233 of them worked in sales and marketing, which would seem to include deployment strategy roles. You can work for Palantir if you're a junior banker. - You'll even get to be part of a 'colony of artists' (as Palantir's CEO described the company), although whether applications are welcome from Morgan Stanley ECM bankers is not entirely clear. 

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