Technical Interviews at Perplexity
Welcome to Perplexity’s technical interviewing portal! We created this portal to demystify the interview process for technical roles at Perplexity. Whether you’re a prospective applicant or a candidate with an upcoming onsite interview, we hope you find these resources useful in understanding both the “what” and the “why” behind our approach to interviewing.
To learn more about life at Perplexity, please visit our Careers hub, which contains open roles and a more general overview of our interview process.
Our interviewing philosophy
No matter which role you’re interviewing for, strong technical candidates stand out at Perplexity through their ability to:
- Think rigorously.
- Navigate and control complexity.
- Discriminate between plausible options and make principled tradeoffs.
- Learn with high sample efficiency.
- Communicate clearly (in words and in code).
Our interview process is designed to provide candidates multiple opportunities to demonstrate these abilities across various role-relevant settings.
Although parts of our interview loops are specialized by role, overall you’ll find more similarities than differences. We have one title for technical team members at Perplexity: Member of Technical Staff. Great technologists are defined not by their momentary interests or specializations, but by a passion for technology in the large. We believe that interviewing, done correctly, uncovers passion and aptitude that transcends domains.
Working at the frontier of AI makes this approach even more critical. Our work requires individuals who are unafraid to bridge disciplines and perspectives. Furthermore, AI is rapidly democratizing knowledge and demolishing barriers between domains of expertise. At Perplexity, model training researchers build thousand-node infrastructure. Engineers do data science. Designers implement features end-to-end. Even our lawyers write and analyze code.
In this new world, we’ve found that team members armed with technical excellence, versatility, and an insatiable curiosity can achieve nearly anything. Our interviews are designed with these underlying principles in mind.
A note on interview integrity
We work hard to make our interview process engaging and fair. Most candidates work hard in turn to showcase their authentic abilities at their finest. If this describes you, no need to read the rest of this blurb!
The rest of the blurb (expand to read).
Unfortunately, a small minority of candidates is less interested in demonstrating their abilities and more interested in demonstrating a boundless diversity of ways to cheat. Our interviewers have seen it all:
- Cluely et al.
- Realtime audio models and screen overlay apps
- Cheating tools running on second, third, and even fourth monitors
- Friends helping off-screen
- Friends subbing in for the candidate
- And a long tail of other harebrained schemes...
Cheating is a waste of both your time and ours: it will almost certainly be caught, with consequences including termination of your candidacy and/or future employment alongside various flavors of legal liability.
Most importantly, cheating will make everyone involved very sad. In short, please don't cheat!
Types of technical interviews
The most common types of technical interviews at Perplexity are:
- Practical Assessment: a practical technical exercise administered online.
- Hands-on Coding: a live hands-on coding exercise.
- Spike Round: a unique, self-steered format that combines coding, technical architecture, and product/system design.
- Agentic Coding: a technical implementation exercise requiring the use of frontier coding agents.
- System Design: an exercise involving the design and review of systems to solve real-world technical problems.
- Core Expertise: an assessment of mastery of a technical discipline.
Click on each of the above links for a detailed overview of the respective interview format.
Note that each role’s interview process involves a different subset of these rounds, and your recruiter will guide you through the process for your specific role. Because each interview loop is carefully curated by our engineering leadership, we don’t accept requests to substitute one type of round for another.
Most interview loops for technical roles also include at least one non-technical round (such as with a manager or cross-functional collaborator). Although these interviews will focus less on technical evaluation, technical topics may still arise during the course of the conversation.
We’re always experimenting and iterating on our process, and you may encounter interview formats that differ from those listed above. You can trust that any interview you encounter has been designed to identify signal along carefully selected dimensions.