Easily one of the worst interview processes I’ve ever experienced. I applied for a mid-level position and had to go through five or six rounds (depending on how you count it) of interviews with a total of eight people and complete a project at home. “OK,” I thought to myself, “this seems like an abnormally long process but maybe they just want to be thorough.” No such luck. At the end of all these rounds of interviews I was promised a final answer twice and didn’t receive one twice. Each time it was a different excuse - “family emergency,” etc.
Eventually, the real reason came out: none of the previous interviews had mattered at all. The CEO (why would this mid-level position go all the way up to the CEO for review?) had taken all of a minute to look at my LinkedIn profile and decide it wasn’t to his liking. Despite the fact that the hiring manager wanted to make me an offer and the time and effort I had spent on the process, I was removed from consideration within a minute.
Now, let’s forget about me for a second. Here’s what this process tells me about decision-making at Braze: even unimportant decisions are made by a founder-CEO who either doesn’t know how to delegate or doesn’t trust his own staff. This “North Korea” style of government might work for a five person startup that gets bought within a year or two of its founding but its not scalable to a larger organization like Braze. Ultimately, I feel like I dodged a bullet here. If months of work can be tossed out the window on a whim then something is seriously wrong with the decision-making process at Braze. Apply at your own risk.