First the basics: Alliance Data bought Bread in 2020, recently adopted its name and re-branded as a tech-first company. I'm pretty sure all they wanted to keep was the name.
Recently, leadership froze hiring, refused to backfill positions, gutted the talent acquisition team, limited states we could hire in... they even turned off slack. Seemed like bureaucracy for bureaucracy's sake.
After a year operating as a separate brand, and hiring aggressively under that impression during that time, a new CTO joined, Matt Brown - who has never written a line of code - and decided overnight that the two brands would be one. To explain, they sent emails using the word strategy a lot and promised they'd resume hiring after concluding their strategic assessment for capacity planning (it's been since January). So, they didn't say why. And they refused to interrupt their strategic assessment while developers leaked out at the rate of 2-3 per week.
CEO Ralph Andretta, on an all hands call, after the last member of the Bread C-Suite had departed (they started trickling out since the summer), actually offered an explanation that made sense: Bread higher-ups had to go because Alliance Data didn't like them. Kudos for the only honest explanation.
It's not fair to judge the entire company on this. You might find a team that's a step up for you in your career. But if you're looking for something classy, specifically in the tech sector, Bread has instead been refurbished as a relic where people in nice suits use the word "strategy" too much.
Or in their language: "a publicly traded provider of loyalty and marketing services, such as private label credit cards, coalition loyalty programs, and direct marketing, derived from the capture and analysis of transaction-rich data."
