Pros
Rescale is a rocket ship. It spent a decade+ building a moat around the best tooling for orchestration of simulation workflows for cloud HPC, and now is building on that to become the de-facto enabler of all kinds of AI-based solutions for engineers and scientists. The goal is ambitious, but clear. Many companies are trying to target engineering markets as glorified wrappers of LLMs, agentic AI services, etc. The architectural moat around compute that Rescale has makes it uniquely better positioned to go after the whole value chain, from computation to agentic AI. It's all in house.
Someone on Glassdoor said that Joris Poort is the kind of leaeder you bet your career on. Strongly agree. He is visionary, curious, and relentless in his drive for real value for engineers over hyped up pilots or PR wins based on thin technical gruel. That culture from the top affects everyone. Leadership is constantly forcing themselves to challenge their own assumptions, especially both the internal and external consequences of building product in the AI boom.
Colleagues are smart and humble here. Have seen few big egos, ankle biting, or stupid political drama. Everyone is bought into communicating in the distributed work model in such a way that it doesn't feel isolating to work remote.
Cons
Any "Con" I've experience so far is run of the mill startup stuff, and things that Rescale manages well: Moving fast at the expense of process/documentation, occasional lack of clarity on ownership/prioritization of cross-functional work, and surges in work pressure near crunch time dates.
If those are dealbreakers, then don't join a startup that's moving with urgency.
