Pros
There is a lot of opportunity to learn. Everyone who works at Cortex aspires to build cool things. The workplace is very collaborative. I agree with another review on here -- in some important ways Cortex is the reverse of a hierarchical management structure. Everyone's opinion is taken seriously. Senior levels of management go beyond being approachable in that they often initiate conversations with lower level workers to get their insight. There are very few places where you can work as a professional inventor. Cortex-Design is one of these places.
Cons
Hours are long. Prototyping hardware is difficult and unpredicable. Cortex is a small and lean team. This means you get to be a major contributor to the company. But it also means timelines get blown up a lot. There is room for improvement in Cortex's project management. Too much project management falls on the shoulders on highly technical staff that should be occupied with technical work. Instead, higher level staff have to juggle project management tasks with their technical work. Keeping projects on track, providing updates to timelines, and giving accurate estimates to clients is crucial in Cortex's line of work. All of these high level objectives are extremely difficult for hardware prototyping. Cortex has many processes, some automated, that it uses and maintains for project management. These process are great, and they generate a lot of insight on how Cortex doing in terms of balancing its billing and time spent on projects. But these processes still take time and work to maintain. Further, tasks like regular check-ins with project team members, scheduling coordination meetings between members, reviewing gantt charts, providing updates to clients, all have to be handled by senior staff. In practise, these project management tasks push hours on team members that drive them late into the night regularly. Time estimates are sometimes overrun due to insufficient communication between team members. Time that could be spent on senior staff supporting lower level workers is taken up by project and client management.