Senior Staff Engineer

Braze•Chicago, IL

2d•Hybrid

About The Position

At Braze, we have found our people. We’re a genuinely approachable, exceptionally kind, and intensely passionate crew. We seek to ignite that passion by setting high standards, championing teamwork, and creating work-life harmony as we collectively navigate rapid growth on a global scale while striving for greater equity and opportunity – inside and outside our organization. To flourish here, you must be prepared to set a high bar for yourself and those around you. There is always a way to contribute: Acting with autonomy, having accountability and being open to new perspectives are essential to our continued success. Our deep curiosity to learn and our eagerness to share diverse passions with others gives us balance and injects a one-of-a-kind vibrancy into our culture. If you are driven to solve exhilarating challenges and have a bias toward action in the face of change, you will be empowered to make a real impact here, with a sharp and passionate team at your back. If Braze sounds like a place where you can thrive, we can’t wait to meet you. Channels power how brands reach customers and foster connections at a global scale. The Channels division is responsible for the entire lifecycle of a message—from the moment a marketer configures a campaign in our dashboard to the moment it’s delivered to a user’s device. As a Senior Staff Engineer, you will be the technical anchor for the division, helping engineering teams ship faster and safer while evolving the shared technical foundations they all rely on. In this role, you will bridge the gap between the customer-facing dashboard and the underlying delivery engines. You will split your time between division-wide technical leadership and hands-on work for critical projects. You will partner with engineering managers and technical leads embedded in teams to ensure our architecture supports a maturing suite of channels, while collaborating with senior leadership on initiatives that ensure a consistent, high-quality experience across the entire division. Together, these teams define how our customers interact with our product and how we interact with the world. Your role is to make sure both are excellent.

Requirements

Have 10+ years of software engineering experience, including meaningful time as a technical leader influencing multiple teams or complex product systems
Are comfortable working across the full stack. You have experience in Ruby on Rails and are proficient in modern frontend environments (TypeScript, React) where customers configure their experience
Have designed and shipped foundational infrastructure. You've built frameworks, libraries, or platform services used by many other engineers to build product features
Bring strong architectural judgment. You know when to invest in abstraction, when to keep things simple, and how to make technical bets that support a maturing product suite
Are an effective communicator and mentor. You can translate technical debt into business risk and elevate the engineers around you through coaching and clear technical vision
Have a track record of identifying highest-leverage work. You can build consensus across different teams and drive projects to completion with minimal direction through high ambiguity

Nice To Haves

Experience building or maintaining shared component libraries or design system primitives
Experience with real-time systems or event-driven architectures as they relate to message orchestration
Experience with developer experience tooling, such as code generation, scaffolding, or CI/CD for large-scale codebases
Experience maturing a product from "early stage" to "enterprise scale" without losing developer velocity

Responsibilities

Partner on the technical vision and quality bar for the division. Drive architectural direction, define best practices, and ensure teams have a clear path to resolving persistent quality and technical debt issues
Lead large, ambiguous projects end-to-end. Drive efforts that span multiple teams from initial problem framing and design docs through implementation, rollout, and operational support
Support maturing channels. Help teams evolve their stacks to support more sophisticated marketing use cases, ensuring that foundational primitives are flexible and robust
Mentor engineers at every level. Simplify hard problems, connect technical decisions to business outcomes, and raise the bar through code review, architecture review, and pairing
Champion reliability and operability. Improve observability and tighten error handling across the dashboard and delivery layers, advocating for incremental rollouts and reducing division-wide incidents
Write code. Staff Engineers at Braze are hands-on; you will design and build the foundational systems and frameworks that act as a force multiplier for the organization

Benefits

Competitive compensation that may include equity
Retirement and Employee Stock Purchase Plans
Flexible paid time off
Comprehensive benefit plans covering medical, dental, vision, life, and disability
Family services that include fertility benefits and equal paid parental leave
Professional development supported by formal career pathing, learning platforms, and a yearly learning stipend
A curated in-office employee experience, designed to foster community, team connections, and innovation
Opportunities to give back to your community, including an annual company-wide Volunteer Week and donation matching
Employee Resource Groups that provide supportive communities within Braze
Collaborative, transparent, and fun culture recognized as a Great Place to Work®