Rapid Growth and Exceptionally Smart Colleagues - Software Engineer, Infrastructure Perplexity AI Employee Review

- Growth has been exponentially high every day for both company and personal. Your impact is extremely big as you gotta work on the most cutting edge AI innovations and the user base is pretty large.

- Your pressure is also high, due to the strong peers and high expectations.

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.