Pros: The offices are good. Company events are ok.

Cons: Braze is an average company with low pay and enough middle managers to run a government. Marketing moves faster than the product. I've seen talented people leave because they're sick of the political circus or answering to managers who don't understand the work they're supposed to evaluate. Their AI initiatives over the past year haven't inspired much confidence. Generating images for slide decks is not the ceiling, managers. Plug in a few LLM agents into the platform is not innovation. Managers just don't seem to get it, you just need to know when is time to take a step aside. Can they still land clients? Sure. Inertia buys time. Would I bet on them surviving the next AI wave with this management? Absolutely not.

Pros: My manager at Braze was great, and the work-life balance was good. It was a great environment to grow as a mid-level engineer, and the Dev Ops experience was pretty nice.

Cons: There is some annoying legacy code. For example, the frontend was a mishmash of Knockout and React, so navigating the codebase and migrating the code was sometimes frustrating.

Pros: The company culture is second to none. The people I work with are extremely intelligent, thoughtful, and a pleasure to work with.

Cons: Being remote only, I don't get to spend as much time at in person events with other co-workers who work in the office or are local to an office.