Pros
1. The people I work with here are awesome 2. I am fairly compensated for my work 3. DataRobot is remote first 4. The work is really interesting, especially in generative AI and I am given time to study important topics in the field. 5. The limit to what you can do here is you. The beauty (and terror) of startup world is that the company needs good people to help everywhere. To elaborate a little more on points 4 and 5: I do a mixture of pre-sales, post-sales, and software engineering work. One hour I will get on a call with a prospect and demo XYZ feature of the product. The next I will work on getting my pull request merged for a package I'm helping out with. The next I'll hack on a problem a client is having and build out a predictive model on the platform together. It doesn't have to be this way. If I want to focus more on one of these than the other, management has historically been very accommodating. That's why I get to do software engineering work in the first place. I have seen other data scientists here move into enablement, management, marketing or fully into engineering. Or they stay where they are and work exactly on what they were hired to do. If you put in the effort and prove you can do a good job I feel like it's pretty much up to you.
Cons
1. The previous leadership team wasted a lot of capital and paid themselves a lot of money to do it. They're gone now, but it put the company in a much worse position than it was in before. 2. Due to the above, we had to lay off about a third of our workforce last year. Wondering if you're going to lose your job is not fun. Losing a bunch of your friends is also not fun. 3. There's a lot of competition from other companies that didn't exist before. That makes sales world harder, especially without continually improving the product. 4. Even now, management makes mistakes in the direction they choose to invest sometimes. I guess that's true for any company but places like Google and Facebook can afford to burn money on pointless projects more easily than we can. 5. The limit to what you can do here is you. The terror (and beauty) of startup world is that the company needs good people to help everywhere.