Performance Reviews
Our Philosophy on Performance Reviews
Since our founding, Turing has prioritized creating an environment where employees can focus entirely on development without losing what can be called startups’ single greatest weapon—speed. As the company grows, we remain committed to this focus while ensuring employee growth and compensation improvements keep pace.
Historically, from founding through April 2024, we conducted salary reviews at each funding milestone. In December 2024, we shifted to an annual performance review cycle. Beginning in 2026, we now conduct performance reviews twice yearly.
This evolution reflects how our organization and business have advanced. Our development milestones are now clearer on a year-to-year basis than at our founding, and measurable outcomes have become more visible. By conducting reviews twice yearly, we reinforce employee motivation and enable employees to focus even more fully on development.
At Turing, performance reviews ultimately serve one purpose: maximizing the realization of full autonomous driving and our development capabilities. Effective evaluation requires properly cycling through leveling, goal-setting, evaluation, and feedback—all requiring a certain allocation of resources. We continually ask ourselves: “How much resource should we invest in performance reviews at this stage?” and update our approach accordingly.
Current System
As noted above, we conduct performance reviews twice yearly, with salary adjustments at each cycle. While simpler than companies that already have established evaluation systems, this process allows us to reflect on the past six months or year and give feedback to employees in the form of salary adjustments.
Starting in December 2025, we redesigned evaluation criteria and rating levels to match our expanded development teams, with briefing sessions for both reviewers and employees being reviewed. From April 2026 onward, alongside salary adjustments, we also grant stock options to employees demonstrating exceptional performance.
Current Limitations
Our current system lacks the traditional evaluation cycle components—leveling, goal-setting, evaluation, and feedback—instead conducting reviews every six months to a year to adjust compensation. At our current scale, managers maintain hands-on awareness of their teams, and most work remains R&D-phase work where evaluation hasn’t been a major challenge.
However, as we scale, we anticipate needing to build systems where both reviewers and those being reviewed can run a virtuous growth cycle with a genuine sense of satisfaction in the process and its outcomes.
Future Direction
As we expand, we’ll likely need a performance evaluation system tailored to Turing’s business characteristics to advance organizational outcomes and culture. The timing depends on our business phase, and we’ll approach this thoughtfully—always prioritizing not slowing down our development speed.
By introducing a performance evaluation system, we are committed to promoting employees’ self-growth and creating an environment where they can work with a greater sense of contribution to the business.
