Perplexity Interview Resources

Perplexity Technical Interviewing Portal

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 working at Perplexity, please visit our Careers hub, which contains open roles and a more general overview of our interview process.

Philosophical underpinnings

No matter which role you’re interviewing for, strong technical candidates stand out through their ability to:

  1. Think rigorously
  2. Navigate and control complexity
  3. 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 narrow 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. At the same time, today’s AI is rapidly democratizing knowledge and demolishing barriers between domains of expertise. At Perplexity, 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.

Types of technical interviews

The most common types of technical interviews at Perplexity are:

Click on each of the above links for a detailed overview of the respective interview format. 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.

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.

Note that 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 technical interview you encounter has been calibrated to identify signal along carefully selected dimensions.

Interview integrity

We work hard to make our interview process engaging and fair. Most candidates in turn work hard to do their best work.

Unfortunately, a small minority of candidates is less interested in demonstrating their skills and abilities and more interested in finding clever (and not-so-clever) ways to cheat. Our interviewers have seen it all:

Cheating is a waste of both your time and ours: it will almost certainly be caught, with consequences including termination of candidacy, termination of future employment, and serious legal liability (both civil and criminal).