Opportunity, but set appropriate expectations - Anonymous employee Tempus AI Employee Review

3.0
Apr 16, 2021
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Tempus has a great story with a clear mission. Hires amazing talent and truly great people. Significant freedom to spent time on personal interest, and generally shape day to day. Personable coworkers, great work life balance with flexible hours and above average pay for the tech side of the house. Enjoyable office (when that matters again). Continued hyperinflation and hiring sprees are starting to show the cracks, but there will always be latest and greatest to explore. Successful pivot to covid testing in 2020 shows the promise of Tempus and was no easy feat. With Lightbank backing, some degree of success is all but assured if you have the patience to deal with the downsides and can deal with the idea of a company this size thinking it can still be run like it has 50 people.

Cons

No 401k match. Your experience will depend entirely on your expectations. If you are beyond entry level, do not expect any room for professional development because there are no clear roles or expectations. Significantly inflated titles for most "managers" with very little outside experience makes itself clear very quickly. Tempus is just doing way too much, way too fast. It's clearly making it up as it goes and there is no long term strategy. Nothing is ever actually complete before being distracted by the next shiny thing. Most initiatives are engineering led meaning there's often little link to any specific business goal. You'll soon tire of chaos for chaos sake and erratic direction. Most days are an exercise in (fake) crisis management without clear lines of decision making or executive boundaries. Over reliance on kudos and compliments on how "genius" everyone is tends to be a sign no one actually knows why what they're doing matters. All this leads to an incredibly jaded workforce.

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Tempus AI Response
5y
We appreciate you taking the time to provide us with all this feedback! We're happy to hear that you’re inspired by the mission, and the coworkers you’re surrounded by. It’s absolutely true that we move very quickly here, and we recognize the need for a focus on professional development and support for managers. We’re putting a lot of thought into addressing that this year, and moving forward, and we hope that this addresses some of the concerns you’ve listed. Our Talent Development team is here if you ever want to discuss offline. The People Ops Team

Explore other reviews about Tempus AI

5.0
Jul 4, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Good place to work at, very impactful work.

Cons

No cons i can think of tbh.

2.0
Mar 12, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

As mentioned work is great since it is cancer research and my coworkers are amazing. Immediate leadership managers and Sr. managers are good as well but somewhat unorganised. Work life balance is good also and health insurance as long as you get BCBS PPO with copay otherwise you're screwed paying off deductible.

Cons

Pay is below industry average, and there is essentially no room to negotiate a better raise. Employees are actively discouraged from discussing compensation, and whatever leadership decides is final, there are no exceptions. If you try to escalate concerns or request a conversation with senior leadership, such as a senior director or VP, you’ll quickly find yourself getting the runaround. Leadership prefers to hide behind layers of management rather than engage directly. There is also no clear or transparent path for career advancement. Opportunities technically exist, but they are extremely limited. You can do everything right, receive a top rating of 5 on your annual performance review, and still not be promoted to manager or see any meaningful improvement in compensation. To make matters worse, the billionaire CEO and founder has said things like, “Don’t worry about pay because we’re curing cancer.” Statements like that feel incredibly out of touch when employees are earning $50k–$60k a year and receiving annual raises of only about $2,000. On top of that, equity is almost impossible to obtain. You have to fight for even the possibility of it, because stock or equity compensation is reserved almost exclusively for the C-suite and directors, with virtually nothing available for employees below that level.

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