Walk me through a technical feature you've led.

"My only FDE interview was this one, so the whole thing felt like a black box and I basically spent about a month in my room figuring out what the role even was. The process started with a recruiter screen, then a hands-on take-home in the product, then a presentation where I had to explain a real technical project from my SWE background to people at different levels. The hard part was not coding. It was all the why questions and staying composed when they asked something I obviously had not prepped for. The final rounds were very leadership-heavy and felt like simulated customer work: one on ones, executive pitches, and a fake-company case."

"I got into the process after a recruiter reached out on LinkedIn for a PM role based in Palo Alto. The recruiter screen was pretty motivation-heavy compared with big tech, with a lot of focus on why AI, what I'd already done in the domain, and why Perplexity specifically. After one 45-minute PM screen, they moved me really quickly into a five-interview final loop with engineering, PM, and design, and almost every round had some mix of product sense, metrics, and stakeholder judgment. The toughest round was a PM case that jumped into self-driving cars and pushed hard on structure, estimation, peak demand, and business model thinking. I didn't get the offer, but they did offer a feedback call afterward, and the main message I took away was that they really value concise structure, strong analytical thinking, and people who've already operated in high-growth startup environments."