Engineering job listings can sometimes appear as intimidating lists of technical expertise — the right experience with the right tech stack in the right subfield.
But at Braze, the approach to tech hiring is a little different.
“We are agnostic on technology experience for most roles, valuing engineers who are continuously learning, by themselves or in collaboration with others,” Director of Product Engineering Francisco Trindade told Built In. “People who are inquisitive, excellent problem solvers and seek the truth in the challenges they tackle daily often succeed at Braze.”
The experience-agnostic approach leaves room for new hires to bring their own robust skill sets to the table, whether experts on infrastructure, operations, or back-end or front-end development. And whether coming in as a new grad in their first tech role or as a seasoned engineering manager who can help shape the team, Trindade is optimistic about the myriad ways new hires can find to thrive.
“At a high-growth company like Braze, there are plenty of growth opportunities,” Trindade said. “We continue to invest in research and development of our products, and people joining our team have the opportunity to shape the company we will be in the future.”
As the team continues to expand, finding candidates who want to grow alongside the company while contributing to its values-based culture is key. According to Trindade, a great tech hire at Braze will work with integrity to help shape the company’s future, adding to the “vibrant” culture and propelling the business forward.
Built In heard from Trindade about the exciting opportunities on the horizon for Braze in 2023 and the details that will help a new hire find a great fit at the company.
WHAT THEY DO
Braze is a customer engagement platform that helps companies like Canva, Venmo, Mercari and more build connections with consumers.
What are the biggest projects your tech team has in 2023?
One of the ways Braze continues to grow — as a product and an organization — is by building on top of our customer engagement platform to help our customers evolve their communication strategies. With billions of messages sent daily by our customers, our challenges span from new product features to infrastructure improvements, which gives our team of more than 150 engineers a broad area of scope. Our framework for meeting customers on their journey also applies to our product strategy which allows us to both simplify the platform for our smaller customers and provide flexibility for our more advanced users.
In infrastructure, we have a strong belief in operational excellence and will keep investing to allow our platform to scale, supporting customer needs while maintaining a stable environment — we have zero tolerance for alerts at night. To support our engineering team, we will continue to improve our dev experience by making our codebase easier to develop, which includes new tools for engineers and also deprecating legacy technologies, making sure we maintain a highly-effective technology stack.
“Success at Braze means using your skills and expertise to help the company achieve impact.”
What opportunities are most exciting for a new hire at Braze?
As we continue to scale, engineers have the opportunity to lead technical innovation as we keep pushing the limits of our capabilities. For those interested in product challenges, we work in cross-functional and highly collaborative teams close to customers, providing opportunities for everyone to shape the product and the company with their input. Product engineering also leads a hack day every four months, where we can flex our creativity and collaborate cross-functionally on fun projects that help make things more efficient and add value to the business.
Beyond individual contributor work, we have a growing organization with new management challenges, primarily focused on maintaining and improving efficiency as we scale in size. Engineering managers are on the front line of this evolution, setting up technology vision and processes while leading our company into the future.
What makes someone successful at Braze?
At Braze, we value impact at every level and in every role of the organization. From individual contributors to all the managers within our department, the focus on business and technology impact helps us align to the same goals. Because of that, success at Braze means using your skills and expertise to help the company achieve impact. It could be through leading technology improvements that make the company more efficient or collaborating with your team on a feature our customers love. Engineers can achieve impact in multiple ways, and we like to leave possibilities open and allow individuals to focus on their strengths.
How are teams and goals structured?
At Braze, we believe in teams that deeply understand their customers and use that knowledge to deliver the best outcome for them. Therefore, we have internal and external-facing vertical product teams, where product, design and engineering own specific parts of the system and collaborate to improve it continuously.
Regarding goals, we focus on bottom-up objectives and a key results process in which teams propose their objectives based on leadership guidance and use their expertise to deliver the most effective results for their customers. This process allows our teams to focus on problems instead of solutions and iterate on features that will continue to make Braze a successful product.