Careers

Work at PerfectRec

We're putting together a great team to help build the future of product recommendation and discovery. We are an all-remote company, so we don't care where you live as long as you work well in a fast-paced, collaborative remote environment.

PerfectRec is an Equal Opportunity Employer. We are committed to finding the best candidates for every role and giving them the tools and guidance they need to succeed. Our all-remote structure enables us to recruit anywhere in the world, so our talent pool isn't limited to a few big cities, and our asynchronous structure allows our team to work when it's best for them. We celebrate diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees.

Open positions

PerfectRec Benefits

We believe in offering generous compensation and benefits tailored to our all-remote workplace.

  • 100% remote and no cost-of-living pay cuts. We want you to work where you work best and we are not going to "adjust" your pay if you move somewhere with a lower cost of living.
  • We pay 100% of your and your dependants' healthcare premium in a high-quality, national PPO plan for US-based employees. For international employees, we will work with you if you're not covered by your national health plan.
  • We will buy the office equipment you need to succeed. Lots of companies are miserly about equipment. We are not going to do that because your time is valuable.
  • 401k with generous matching. Once we have 20 employees, we'll set up a 401k program with generous matching.
  • Generous PTO. We trust everyone to take time off appropriately for themselves. We're pro-regular vacations - not taking regular breaks isn't good for individuals or the team. Once we have 20 employees, we will establish a more formal PTO policy.
  • Worry-free sick days. If you're sick, take the time off to get well. Just let your manager know as soon as practicable.
  • Free products that we're reviewing. We are becoming product experts together, and we will send you cool stuff like monitors and TVs as we add new recommendation lines. (Unfortunately, we won't be able to do this for cars.)

How We Work

Many workplaces are bad. We are committed to making ours good. That does not mean ping-pong tables or laundry service. That does mean a serious, deliberate approach to how we work together and solve problems. We want work to be fun, interesting, engaging, and collaborative. We are interested in efficiency but not hierarchy. We value competence over confidence. We celebrate skeptics and like people who like thinking. And we are highly supportive of everyone's personal and professional long-term goals.

How We Think

A successful startup should be thoughtful and reasonable, but operate with a sense of urgency. Here are the basic principles that summarize our approach.

  • Identifying and understanding problems: We seek first to deeply understand problems and their context before starting work. This helps us build the right solution and not just a solution. Everyone is encouraged to bring up problems, whether they have a solution or not. Often, the person who can identify a problem is not the same person who can solve it.
  • Being explicit about our approach: Some problems require entirely new solutions based on first-principles, others can be reasonably solved by pattern matching off of solutions that work elsewhere. Often, our trickiest challenges will require some combination of both approaches. We are always explicit about what approach we are taking and why so as to avoid reinventing the wheel.
  • Incentives: We all win together, and to do that means we need to consider what motivates people both inside and outside the company. We always seek to understand and align our incentives when solving a problem.
  • Sweat the big stuff: Some decisions are more consequential than others. We put more effort into analysis and research before making the consequential decisions. We consider how the decision improves the whole business, not just part of it, while not compromising what we already have.
  • Shared understanding: When undertaking a project, we work hard to establish a shared understanding of the underlying goals and facts. Often, what appears to be disagreements about a strategy or approach are actually disagreements about the underlying goal or evidence.
  • The scientific method:This is our most powerful work tool. We use it to think through the many open-ended situations we face as a startup. We identify our hypothesis, and then figure out how to gather evidence to efficiently test it.
  • Honesty:We don't lie, and we don't make things up. We challenge each other directly and care personally. We don't convey a false sense of certainty. When we make claims, we appropriately explain our confidence level in them. We can't solve complicated problems if we aren't honest with each other when discussing them.

How We Operate Remotely

We are all-in on all-remote work.

Our founding team has been managing all-remote companies since long before Covid, and we've found that flexible, asynchronous work is the most efficient and humane way to operate.

At the same time, some real-time collaboration is essential. We aim to all generally be available for meetings Monday through Friday between 9 a.m. and 3 p.m. Pacific.

How We Lead

Good leadership is not an accident. Different companies have different leadership styles. Here are our principles.

  • Lead with context. That means giving your team the information and techniques they need to make their own good decisions, rather than just handing out action items, a script, or an inflexible playbook. This empowers people to do their best and most fulfilling work.
  • Lead with example. Be considerate of other people's time, preferences, and needs. Help people follow a process you're in charge of by carrying it out effectively yourself.
  • Establish ownership of responsibilities. Recognize when someone needs to be responsible for something, and make sure it has a clear owner. That could be a specific task, or an ongoing responsibility, or an additional aspect of an already established responsibility.
  • Set clear goals. Whoever is responsible for a project or process needs to identify its goals, communicate about them, and build agreement among stakeholders.
  • Give regular feedback to your direct reports and solicit feedback from them. We do holistic annual reviews, but most feedback from managers should come from ongoing two-way communication between managers and their direct reports.

What We Avoid

What we do is important. So is what we don't do. Here are some practices we will not be adopting.

  • Excessive consultants: We're unusually skeptical of third-party consultants and professional experts. There is often a very poor alignment of incentives between consultants and their clients. Even very expensive consultants are often bad. It's important to understand the underlying incentives that consultants have so we can evaluate their advice in the proper context.
  • Substituting tools or processes for solutions: In too many companies, new software tools or processes are rolled out as a solution to structural problems, or just to create the illusion of progress. We don't do that. We use new tools or processes only when they are a measurable improvement over old ones and worth the transition cost.
  • Powerpoint: We will never use Google Slides, PowerPoint or other presentation software unless absolutely necessary. If you can't explain your idea in writing, it probably needs more work.
  • Overconfidence in product design: We form theories about what our users want and need, then test them rather than operating based on guesses or assumptions.
  • Wasting user's time: Our time is valuable, and so is our customer's. Our heuristic is that user time is worth at least $50/hr and we try to optimize our product accordingly.