Braze interview questions

1. In-house HR staff 30 min phone call with some STAR-style behavioural questions and a long marketing pitch from them to you. 2. 1 hour technical round. There's a senior software developer that asks you the question and another lesser ranked developer that observes and is mostly quiet (seems like it's just training for the 2nd developer). They get right into it. 3. ?... I didn't make it here Braze seems to look for people who are highly highly skilled technically and I don't think they care about anything else. I say this not only because the software developer who interviewed me had no interpersonal skills and was very stone-faced and even thinly disguising his poor judgment of me, but because I know someone who got hired here as a developer and she is extremely extremely smart and even she says that Braze obviously filters very strongly for excellence. The way she has described the people she works with... they seem emotionally robotic but highly highly intelligent. I mean I guess you have to be to work for a company that pays you bags and bags of money (they told me their salary range in the first interview and it's very high) to make such a culturally bereft product. It's not worse than FAANG or anything, but this is the profile. And the interview was a bad experience. I think training non-HR applicant-facing staff to know how to make someone feel comfortable would be worthy of being included in the company's definition of excellence.

From start to finish, the process took a month and a half (due to rescheduling) After applying online, the recruiter contacted me within the week to schedule the initial screening. The recruiters were helpful and took the time to guide me through the process. The only negative was that the initial contact was scheduled with a person in the US time zone (while I'm in Europe) for a role in Europe. The next stage was an interview with the Manager for the Customer Success team, who is hiring. The discussion was easy. We talked about my experience, the team, the company, etc. The next stage was a panel interview roleplaying a CSM presenting to clients based on the received brief. The panel consisted of a Senior team member, the Manager of the Customer Success team, and the Director of the Customer Success department. The panel asked questions about my experience, apart from their engagement in their roleplay. The only difficulty was questions specific to their platform. The final feedback came roughly 2 weeks after this stage. It was negative, however, detailed enough to know people were paying attention. The main reason for the negative response was wanting someone with "deeper knowledge of data ingestion methods and a more comprehensive understanding of the Braze platform". Realistically, while the first part may be somewhat reasonable, the second part would be something you would gain either as a Braze client or employee.