Sharing and Growing: Welcome to Building Braze

When I started Braze (formerly Appboy) just over seven years ago in New York City with my co-founders Bill Magnuson and Mark Ghermezian, the new, always-on mobile era that we’re in today was just beginning to accelerate. We wanted to help brands navigating this new technology environment humanize customer relationships by giving them the tools they needed to understand and treat their audience members as people, not devices.

Ultimately, our business is about building connections. To do that well, we’ve made it a priority to educate people about technology and the impact it can have—and is having—on customer engagement. For our customers, Braze Academy offers a place to explore what’s possible with today’s technology and dive deep into sophisticated engagement strategies. We recently took those efforts a step further by launching Learning at Braze (LAB), a learning management system designed to provide online courses and interactive content on marketing and customer engagement to our clients.

Similarly, we’ve found that our engineers, product managers, and product designers are looking for ways to share the ideas and learnings we’ve had while building the Braze platform from the ground up. There’s a lot of ground to cover when it comes to building a product: research, ideation, design, engineering, testing, release management, running technical operations and evolving our organizational structure, to name only a few.

That's why we're starting Building Braze: to share our experiences with a larger community in the hopes that other teams can learn from our insights, best practices, challenges, failures, and successes, just as we've learned from so many other product and engineering teams that have written about their experiences.

Building for scale is a huge part of what we do at Braze. Each month, we send more than 40 billion messages to mobile devices, web browsers and inboxes, and serve more than 1.4 billion monthly active users across top brands like Disney, Lyft and Microsoft. As product designers, we focus on building a user experience that’s intuitive whether you’re sending notifications to 10 users or 10 million. As engineers, we’ve architected our product using high performance technologies like Kafka and Redis, moving hundreds of megabytes per second with the former and processing millions of operations per second with the latter. We have one of the world's largest MongoDB installations, over 3,000 MongoDB database processes!

Our infrastructure is reactive and predictive: our message sending and data processing server fleet automatically scales up and down based on current and anticipated future traffic (by the way, it takes us about 4 minutes to build and bring online a new server, but we’re pushing ourselves to get it to 60 seconds by the end of this summer). We’ll be digging into these topics and others in the months to come.

At Braze, you’ll find distributed systems and Google Ventures Design Sprints. We think deeply about how to prioritize our roadmap in a complex technology landscape that changes virtually every month. Welcome to Building Braze—I can’t wait to share more of our organization with you.

Braze is hiring for a variety of roles in engineering, product management, and design. Check out our careers page to learn about our open roles and our culture.