Perplexity

The company is clearly at an inflection point, with usage accelerating across all metrics. This has created genuinely interesting scaling challenges. They’ve brought in some of the strongest infrastructure talent from places like Uber and Meta, making it an incredible environment for learning. The exposure ranges from database performance issues to sophisticated model-pooling work, offering a ton of hands-on growth opportunities.

The pace can be intense—teams often put in long hours, and incidents require immediate attention.

Leadership is extremely focused on minimizing downtime, which can make it difficult to fully switch off.

Additionally, the team is still relatively young, so there are fewer mentorship opportunities for very senior engineers unless they’re interested in transitioning into management.

Consider hiring more principal and staff-level engineers to strengthen technical leadership. It would also help if the C-suite dialed back the intensity at times to create a more sustainable environment.