The first step was a 30–40 minute phone screening with a recruiter. The conversation was relaxed and focused mainly on my background, experience, and interest in the role rather than deep technical 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.