Great place to learn! - Engineer Pronto.ai Employee Review

No pros it was pretty bad time

Not a great work environment. They put a lot of pressure on everyone to meet false deadlines they sold to the potential customers.

ICs were generally great to work with. Super driven, creative, smart. Social events (happy hours, offsites, etc) were genuinely a lot of fun. Depending on your role, you may have a lot of ownership over your work. Depending on your role, working hours can be flexible. The job is listed as 5 days a week in office, but people worked from home pretty regularly. The office itself is a little disordered, but I liked it. It had everything I needed + very solid snacks and drinks. If you're coming from a more pure software background, being around all that hardware is cool. In my opinion, the product itself is good and valuable, and worth creating. I think people were/are willing to put up with a lot to see it through. Other than the issues listed below, technical leadership was mostly solid. All managers were highly technical, and constantly in the weeds. Frankly technical leadership could afford to take a step back and relent control, and they'll need to in order for the company to scale. Growth opportunities were quite good, but you really needed to take control, self promote, and fight for yourself. Management does not hold your hand. Really depends on who you are, but you might find the slapdash hacky way the company operates to be exciting. You'll come away with some fun stories. Dog friendly office!

There were recently layoffs, and a portion of the severance agreement specifically tells ex-employees that they aren't allowed to post reviews on Glassdoor, so that should explain why the company doesn't have many reviews. Employees were offered 2 weeks of severance. The company is not very transparent with its finances. It was difficult to get accurate information on things like runway, funding progress, etc. Depending on your position, leadership will micromanage or take over work you've already started. Work was super stressful for people who were required to travel to mine sites. Potentially weeks of long hours away from home. Pronto is not a mature company. The majority of the senior engineering staff are on their first job out of school. The organization and practices of the company reflect that. You will not get performance reviews on time if you get them at all. The CEO, Anthony Levandowski is frequently a distraction and is sometimes actively harmful to the company. He has a tendency to go around ICs' direct managers and assign them projects that should not take priority, but can be difficult to turn down. It was often a question of whether an ask should be taken seriously, or if this was an "Anthony project". Anthony made a few employees cry during my tenure at the company. Anthony also employed multiple family members at the company. The PR environment for the company can also be pretty rough at times given Anthony's history. That was looking up near the end of my tenure. Staffing is thin and there is a lot of thrash. You will need to do the work of multiple employees, and it can be difficult to complete anything that takes longer than a few days without getting pulled off to do something more urgent. If you are a robotics engineer in particular, you should be prepared to travel and work outside of the office frequently. Working hours at mines start early. Comp was middle of the road to the low end of things for more senior employees. If you had a graduate degree, your salary was pretty decent. If you're joining at this point, equity is going to be tiny. Health insurance was crappy small startup insurance. There is going to be a lot of jargon, and people will not go out of their way to explain things to you. You will need to ask a lot of questions.