Extreme stress and extreme growth - Avis employé Member Of Technical Staff Perplexity AI

With use increasing across all indicators, the firm is undoubtedly at a turning point. This has resulted in scaling issues that are quite fascinating. It's an amazing learning environment since they've brought in some of the best infrastructure people from companies like Uber and Meta. There are many prospects for practical advancement, ranging from complex model-pooling tasks to database performance difficulties.

Teams frequently work long hours, the pace can be fast, and issues need to be addressed right away. It might be challenging to completely unplug since leadership is so focused on reducing downtime. Furthermore, extremely senior engineers have fewer mentorship options unless they want to move into management because the team is still very young.

A lot of others say this but honestly can't emphasize it enough - these are some of the smartest, most humble people I've worked with. Some lead entire GTM, data science, engineering teams, etc. to return to an IC role. They simply love to build. You rarely get to see that energy in tech companies nowadays. Many people here genuinely believe Perplexity is the future of search and are resilient when things get tough. I am quite excited to work next to them. The founders keep the bar high and fire fast when things aren't working; it used to bother me initially but realized these individuals are actually happier at other companies, which makes me realize we're doing the right thing.

The downside of working with great people is that they're truly obsessive eg don't do much except build. They're always thinking about the product, the research, users, etc. which means you don't feel like you get time to do other things. You definitely get your weekends off but sometimes expected to crank through weekends for a major product launch. However, seeing millions of people dive into the feature you built and praise it on Twitter, Reddit, etc. is super rewarding. I can definitely see culture shock at the pace of shipping.