Perplexity Spike Round Instructions

Congratulations! You’ve successfully scheduled your Spike round. We can’t wait to see what you build. Please carefully review these instructions before your interview date.

Basic logistics

You will work on a technical project for up to 9 hours, beginning on the start date/time confirmed by you and your recruiter. We’re providing 9 hours to provide flexibility and ease time pressure. We do not expect you to be in front of your computer for all 9 hours. You are free to take meal breaks, run errands, or otherwise step away to attend to daily life.

You’ll receive your project spec via email approximately 5 minutes before your official start time.

The bulk of your time will be spent working on your project, but you should budget the last 10–20 minutes of your six-hour slot to give a short recap of your work. We’d like to request that you keep both your webcam and screen sharing (entire screen) on during the interview. You may keep your microphone off if you’d like - but please make sure that your microphone is enabled when presenting your recap. You may take as many breaks from your computer as you need.

Resources and AI usage

You may use any resources you’d like during the Spike round, other than live human assistance. This means you can use your dev environment of choice, including AI dev tools such as Claude Code, Codex CLI, Cursor, etc. You may also use Perplexity or your favorite chatbot app.

To be clear: there are absolutely no restrictions on how you are allowed to leverage AI during this round. Looking up information? Brainstorming? Planning? Implementation? All of these and more are fair game. There’s no such thing as “cheating” during this round, other than getting help from other humans. If AI helps you get stuff done much faster, that just means you have more time to make your project truly shine.

That said, it is also very easy to use AI in suboptimal ways that slow you down and/or reduce the quality of your work product. Ineffective use of AI will result in a negative assessment.

Reimbursement

We’ll reimburse you for up to $750 in technical costs incurred during the Spike round. These costs include things like coding tool & IDE subscriptions (single month only), AWS/Azure/GCP costs, LLM API usage/prepaid credits, and other relevant technical expenses needed to make your project a success. You may use as much or as little of this $750 budget as you need - however, keep in mind that overages above $750 will not be reimbursed. Your recruiter will provide reimbursement instructions after the interview - please retain receipts.

Important pre-interview setup steps

Zoom

The Spike round will be conducted via Zoom rather than Google Meet. This is to facilitate recording of the session (Zoom captures your screen in full resolution, which will be handy during your recap presentation). Remember that no Perplexity employee will be dialing in during the interview - you’ll be the only person in the Zoom meeting.

Make sure you have Zoom installed on your computer before your interview. Please also make sure that you have granted microphone, camera, and screen sharing privileges. To test that your camera, microphone, and screen sharing are working, you may use the below test meeting link.

Test Meeting: https://zoom.us/j/94260632448?pwd=AOMLgWejVvvjrQNtkPETdRaWdqb3s5.1

Your development environment

To save time during your Spike round, you should make sure that your desired development environment is ready to go. You may use your computer’s local environment, a cloud development environment, or a mix of both.

Typically, we’ll expect backend and modeling code to be written in Python 3, and client-side scripts (if any) to be written in TypeScript. We’re extremely flexible on other dependencies (though we’ll expect sound technical judgment in your choice of dependencies).

Make sure that the following things are ready to go:

• IDE / code editor
• Your AI coding tool(s) of choice
• Your preferred technology stack, including any packages you might want to use
• Any cloud environments you might want to use (for example, AWS and Google Colab)
• Any other resources needed in light of your project proposals

Instructions for interview day

The below instructions will come in handy during interview day. You can review these instructions beforehand if you’d like a better sense of how the Spike round will proceed.

10-15 minutes before

First, please ensure you’re in an environment free from distractions. Make sure your computer and internet connection are working normally.

Join the Zoom meeting (using the link your recruiter sent you) 10-15 minutes before the start time. After joining, you’ll hear Zoom tell you that the meeting is being recorded.¹ Make sure to:

1. Turn your webcam on.
2. Share your screen. Make sure to share your entire screen, not just a single window.
   1. If you have multiple monitors, you may either share both monitors (Zoom has this feature) or choose a primary monitor to work on your project and share only that primary monitor.
3. Turning on your microphone is optional. However, if you leave it off, please remember to turn it back on when you begin your recap presentation!

After you’ve joined the Zoom meeting, you may launch your IDE / other developer applications.

5 minutes before

Around 5 minutes before your official start time, you’ll receive the project spec via email. You should carefully read the project spec and start thinking about initial directions.

0h to 1h

During the first hour of the interview, you’ll likely be doing a mix of online research, technical setup (e.g., grabbing any extra packages not already installed), and other exploratory steps.

It’s OK to make minimal progress during the first hour. We know that real-life work is nonlinear, and taking time to understand the solution space and set up good technical foundations is usually time well spent. Of course, if you feel ready to start diving right in, you’re free to do so!

Finally, we recommend using a Git repository and committing your work as you go along. This will give you checkpoints to revert to in case you (or your AI coding tool) accidentally mess something up. However, if you think Git would slow you down and you’re confident that you won’t make accidental deletions or edits, then you can choose not to use Git.

1h to 8h

We anticipate that most of your progress will occur between the one-hour mark and the eight-hour mark. Remember that you can step away from your computer, stretch, run errands, grab a snack, etc whenever you need. If you complete the full project scope early, you can use the remaining time to improve performance/design/organization or to implement additional scope.

8h to 8h 40m

At the 8 hour mark, you should start thinking about how you want to gracefully land your project. You can still keep coding/implementing, but you should generally prioritize leaving the project in a good state rather than racing to complete additional scope. This is also a good time to make sure your README.md file is in good shape, as we’ll use the file to understand what you built.

8h 40m to 9h

Around the 8 hour 40 minute mark, you should begin your recap presentation. Before you start, make sure your microphone is on and working! (Naturally, your webcam and screen sharing should already be on). Your recap should typically be between 10 and 20 minutes long. Demos are encouraged, as are discussion of important design decisions, learnings, and any other useful information you think would benefit the viewer.

9h

Once 9 hours after your official start time have passed, your recap presentation should be finished (but it’s OK if you go 1–2 minutes over).

After wrapping up your recap presentation, you should grab all relevant files (your git repo/codetree, any useful artifacts, etc.), compress them into a single ZIP file, and upload the ZIP file using the Dropbox submission portal below. You don’t need a Dropbox account.

Submission portal: https://www.dropbox.com/request/6oAKspJs9dt57xktC1vE

Once your ZIP file is submitted, you may leave the Zoom call and congratulate yourself on a job well done!

Evaluation criterion

We don’t have a rigid evaluation rubric for the Spike round. Generally, we’ll be looking at:

• Project scope completed: how much of the intended project scope did you complete? Did you prioritize the most important parts? Did you make reasonable assumptions where necessary/ambiguous?
• Methodology: how sound were your technical methods? Did you exercise good technical judgment and make reasonable tradeoffs? Did you effectively troubleshoot issues?
• Performance and functionality: How well does your final submission work? For user-facing tools, are the ergonomics user-friendly?
• Effective use of tools: do you use tools (including AI tools) effectively and responsibly to make yourself more productive? Are you able to avoid introducing unnecessary complexity and bugs into your project through improper overreliance on AI tools?
• Code quality and legibility: how’s your code quality? how well-organized is the codebase? How’s the documentation? If time permits, did you write tests?
• Communication: how effective was your README.md file and recap presentation at explaining what you did, how you did it, and what the key decision points were?

Ultimately, we’re looking to understand whether you’ll be an effective technical contributor at Perplexity. There are many ways to demonstrate this, and you shouldn’t stress out about reaching absolute perfection. We know this is a big undertaking and we deeply appreciate the time you’re devoting to this project.