Senior Staff Engineer at Braze in Chicago, IL

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. WHAT YOU'LL DO 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. In this role you will: 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 Recent and ongoing work across the division includes: Developing shared frameworks for our marketing message editors to ensure a consistent experience across all messaging channels Evolving the dashboard to support real-time feedback and sophisticated channel-specific settings Building platforms and code-generation tooling that allow teams to spin up and mature new channels with minimal friction Migrating legacy front-end logic to modern, React-based systems within the dashboard to improve developer and end-user experience Parts of our stack with which you will work: Ruby, Ruby on Rails TypeScript, React MongoDB Event-driven architectures Distributed Systems and API Design WHO YOU ARE 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 Bonus experience: 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 For candidates based in the United States, the pay range for this position at the start of employment is expected to be between $208,000 and $349,655/year with an expected On Target Earnings (OTE) between $232,000 and $390,000/year (including bonus or commission). Your exact offer may vary depending on multiple individualized factors, including market location, job-related knowledge, skills, and experience. In addition to cash compensation, this role qualifies for a comprehensive Total Rewards package that includes equity grants of restricted stock (RSUs) so that you will own a piece of our company. #LI-Hybrid WHAT WE OFFER Braze benefits vary by location, and we encourage you to review our specific benefits offerings for each country here. More details on benefits plans will be provided if you receive an offer of employment. From offering comprehensive benefits to fostering hybrid ways of working, we’ve got you covered so you can prioritize work-life harmony. Braze offers benefits such as: 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® ABOUT BRAZE Braze is the leading customer engagement platform that empowers brands to Be Absolutely Engaging.™ Braze helps brands deliver great customer experiences that drive value both for consumers and for their businesses. Built on a foundation of composable intelligence, BrazeAI™ allows marketers to combine and activate AI agents, models, and features at every touchpoint throughout the Braze Customer Engagement Platform for smarter, faster, and more meaningful customer engagement. From cross-channel messaging and journey orchestration to Al-powered decisioning and optimization, Braze enables companies to turn action into interaction through autonomous, 1:1 personalized experiences. The company has repeatedly been recognized as a Leader in marketing technology by industry analysts, and was voted a G2 “Best of Marketing and Digital Advertising Software Product” in 2025. Braze was also named a 2025 Best Companies To Work For by U.S. News & World Report, a 2025 America’s Greatest Companies by Newsweek, and a 2025 Fortune Best Workplace in Technology™ by Great Place To Work®, among other accolades. Braze is also proudly certified as a Great Place to Work® in the U.S., the UK, Australia, and Singapore. The company is headquartered in New York with offices in Austin, Berlin, Bucharest, Chicago, Dubai, Jakarta, London, Paris, San Francisco, São Paulo, Singapore, Seoul, Sydney and Tokyo. BRAZE IS AN EQUAL OPPORTUNITY EMPLOYER At Braze, we strive to create equitable growth and opportunities inside and outside the organization. Building meaningful connections is at the heart of everything we do, and that includes our recruiting practices. We're committed to offering all candidates a fair, accessible, and inclusive experience – regardless of age, color, disability, gender identity, marital status, maternity, national origin, pregnancy, race, religion, sex, sexual orientation, or status as a protected veteran. When applying and interviewing with Braze, we want you to feel comfortable showcasing what makes you you. We know that sometimes different circumstances can lead talented people to hesitate to apply for a role unless they meet 100% of the criteria. If this sounds familiar, we encourage you to apply, as we’d love to meet you. Please see ourCandidate Privacy Policy for more information on how Braze processes your personal information during the recruitment process and, if applicable based on your location, how you can exercise any privacy rights.