Hiring trends suggest Palantir’s profitability poised to keep growing

Hiring and recruiting activity by Palantir (PLTR) and other companies that use its technology indicates that the tech giant’s profits and margins are likely to keep rising significantly in the coming quarters.

Palantir’s ability to boost profitability matters because its super-high valuation—at a trailing P/E of 444x earnings—remains a sticking point for analysts and investors. While Palantir’s multiple is down from a peak this summer of about 600x, it’s still significantly higher than all of its much smaller rivals. It well outpaces Apple’s (AAPL) peak P/E ratio in the post–dot-com era of about 100x, for example.

Yet hiring patterns for the national security and military segments tracked by ClearanceJobs.com suggest a new narrative emerging for Palantir. The data reveals that the company and the hundreds of firms in its ecosystem have been moving from an intense software-development phase into a stage characterized by a greater emphasis on operational deployment.

For technology firms, the development phase demands heavy investment, including in high-cost engineering talent, but yields little revenue. That dynamic reverses once the software moves into active deployment.

Palantir and its partners’ transition into the more profitable stages of the software cycle underscores the promise of its military contracts. That progress, of course, could still slow or stall. Only three of the 16 major Wall Street analysts who have covered the stock in the last three months consider it a Buy, primarily because of its high valuation.

Even so, the stock’s tailwinds are strong, including continued expansion of global military budgets and Palantir’s close connections within the Trump administration. The company’s bottom line and margins appear poised to rise dramatically.

Under the hood of Palantir’s hiring engine

Over the year that ended in September 2025, Palantir and its ecosystem of more than 500 clients, partners, and subcontractors recruited fewer software developers and more professionals involved in utilizing the firm’s products, according to an analysis of ClearanceJobs.com’s monthly security-cleared job postings.  

Posts by these companies seeking software development professionals peaked at slightly over 250 in October 2024, fell to about 225 in November, and then sank sharply in December, to about 160. And the number of such ads never climbed above 200 again through September 2025, except for a brief spike to about 225 in August. May, July, and September totals fell further, to about 150.

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Meanwhile, postings for professionals who use Palantir’s software rather than build it have been headed in the opposite direction—including for data and analytics professionals and intelligence and defense experts. From October 2024 to February 2025, Palantir and its ecosystem averaged 75 such job listings per month; from March to September 2025, that figure rose to 85—a roughly 13% increase.

Palantir's third quarter momentum accelerated

Palantir’s third-quarter 2025 results suggest the company is entering a maturity stage, with its products largely built out and achieving significant adoption. Software firms typically enjoy stronger margins at this point in their lifecycle, as earlier heavy R&D investments begin to yield returns.

The company’s adjusted income from operations soared to $600.5 million last quarter versus $275.5 million in the same period a year earlier, driving an adjusted operating margin of 51%, up from 38% in Q3 of 2024.  

And research and development spending as a percentage of revenue has declined sharply. Full-year 2024 R&D expense represented nearly 18% of revenue. By 3Q 2025, R&D was running at 12.2% of revenue.

No doubt Palantir’s path to a less daunting valuation remains steep. The company’s profits would have to soar almost 4.5 times to bring its P/E ratio in line with Apple’s post-2001 peak. Or consider another big AI-fueled stock: For Palantir’s valuation to fall as “low” as Nvidia’s (NVDA), its profits would need to grow eightfold.

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