Interview format

Practical Assessment

Overview

For many technical roles at Perplexity, the interview process begins with an at-home practical assessment. We view our practical assessments as a way to provide a realistic preview of the types of technical challenges we solve at Perplexity, while also giving us a chance to evaluate candidates’ technical skills in a self-contained format.

Logistics

Our practical assessments are typically conducted within a CoderPad session which allows you to write, run, and debug code in a lightweight IDE-like environment. They are self-scheduled, meaning you may schedule the assessment for a time that works best for you. You’ll receive an email shortly before your scheduled window begins to complete the assessment.

Most practical assessments are designed to be completed in 45 to 90 minutes. However, we don’t want time pressure to determine your success on the assessment. Therefore, you’ll typically have either 2 hours or 4 hours to complete the assessment. Your recruiter will provide you with the specific timing for your assessment.

You may submit anytime before the submission timer expires. Please don’t feel pressured to set any time records; there are no bonus points for submitting early.

Goals

We have a couple of goals with our practical assessments. First, we’d like to align expectations by providing a realistic portrayal of the skills we’re looking for during our technical interviews. We’ve designed our practical assessments to offer a good preview of the expectations we’ll have in future interview rounds.

Second, we want to give a sample of the technical challenges we solve at Perplexity. While no single exercise can fully demonstrate the range of problems our team members address daily, we hope the practical assessment is an enjoyable way to explore some Perplexity-relevant problem domains in a self-contained format.

Question format

Our practical assessments are designed to be similar to our hands-on coding interviews. Please refer to the hands-on coding guide for a sense of which format and topics to expect.

Outside assistance & interview integrity

We expect candidates to complete our practical assessments independently. We do not allow the use of AI or other outside assistance (such as the internet or other humans) during practical assessments.

There are two exceptions to this rule:

Exception 1: you may refer to online language documentation.

Exception 2: you may use Perplexity, a search engine, or another AI tool to ask questions about your language’s libraries (including to see example usage). However, you should not ask the tool to produce any significant part of your answer.

Breaching this policy is treated as an integrity violation, with the consequent pre-employment, post-employment, and/or legal ramifications described in our note on interview integrity.

Evaluation criteria

Please refer to our hands-on coding interview guide for a sense of how we evaluate practical assessments.

Language choices

Please refer to our hands-on coding interview guide for an overview of which programming languages we support and recommend for practical assessments. Note that certain domain-specific practical assessments may only be offered in a single language.