Pros
You get to work day to day with some amazingly smart colleagues tackling some really hard problems in tech. Depending on your manager, your working arrangement can be very flexible and supportive. Product is very good and is potentially life saving in a lot of scenarios, but limited in growth potential.
Cons
There is a serious lack of vision from leadership. They are more interested in buzz words in AI, rather than actually making much needed improvements to the product and internal processes. Almost seems like their only concern running the company is to appease investors and not their customers or employees. Senior leadership has significantly overestimated performance projections and underdelivered on execution, which means you are dealing with constantly changing directions and decisions, and doing duplicate and unnecessary work. That has negatively impacted the culture and benefits (which were great before, but only barely competitive now). To put scale of the mess in perspective, Dataminr's headcount is down 40% within a single year (About 30% via layoffs, 10% voluntary departures). And unsurprisingly, almost all of senior leadership kept their jobs during the two layoffs. Losing a significant portion of the company and still consistently delivering is unrealistic and brings into question the company outlook over the next few years. The lack of communication from senior leadership is laughable. Over the last 2 years of internal surveys, the top feedback has been better communication from leadership. They acknowledged the issue without showing any improvement. Leadership shows superficial concern towards employee's wellbeing but doesn't follow through when it's actually important. Layoff decisions are made at the top level by summing up everyone's performance to a single number, without getting actual input from direct managers or co-workers. Note to visa holders, seriously consider other places to work. Dataminr will not give a second thought about your status before dropping you.
