Pros: - Coworkers are technically competent, passionate, and always ready to lend a helping hand. - Working on high-impact projects from the get-go. - High amount of responsibility. - Google-style TGIF meetings with good transparency. - Amazing view of the bay at the office. You think I'm overstating it, but it seriously energizes me. - We are actively making efforts to improve processes in order to mitigate growing pains. Cool benefits: - Free lunch. - All the Ito En tea you can drink. - 15 days PTO, 12 paid holidays, unlimited sick time. - Reimbursements for gym, internet, and mobile. - 401k matching. - Insurance. - If you're in the Seattle office, a Dance Dance Revolution machine.

Cons: Sometimes our goals are too aggressive, and we end up sacrificing quality for ship time. Experiencing growing pains, which are the cause of some organizational issues and underdeveloped engineering conventions/documentation. Sometimes it feels like we need to pull long hours because of our aggressive goals. However, I also just really like working on Pokemon Go, so that's also a factor. From what I've heard, experience varies quite a bit from team to team, with perception of cost center versus profit center. Despite our efforts towards transparency, we are not fully transparent, e.g., about upcoming project codenames. Meetings can sometimes feel a bit pointless for some attendees.

Pros: The recent game is doing well.

Cons: Leadership wandered for a while.

Pros: Bringing delight and joy to hundreds of millions of people. How many tech industry jobs offer that? Fun, positive, diverse workplace. Passionate people who play Ingress and Pokemon Go and other games daily. Hard problems like global scale for many million QPS, basic research in advanced AR and image understanding, games that people love. Proud to be at Niantic.

Cons: Very busy, hard work, personal challenge. It's like grad school, with hard new problems not in the literature, combined with tight schedules and ambitious goals. Sometimes it feels like an endless IQ test. (But afterwards, there's lots of pride and deep friendships.)