I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Braze in May 2025
Interview
recently went through the interview process at Braze, and overall, it was a smooth and well-organized experience. The coordinators were prompt, the interviewers were thoughtful, and the scheduling was handled efficiently. Each round felt structured and fair, and I genuinely enjoyed the conversations.
That said, despite performing well in all my interviews (I received full positive feedback), I was ultimately rejected after two rounds with hiring managers. The reason provided was that they were looking for someone with a more senior background based on past experience, which was disappointing. It felt disheartening to be judged primarily on prior titles rather than demonstrated capability during the process.
I still appreciate the professionalism of the team, but I hope future evaluations place more weight on actual interview performance and potential rather than just resume history.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Coding Round:
This round was structured around a Candy Crush-style elimination game. It involved three related Leetcode-style questions that built upon one another.
Debugging Round:
I was given a Caesar Cipher implementation that had over 10 issues, including logic bugs, edge case failures, and broken unit tests. I wasn’t expected to fix all of them but rather identify key problems, fix a few, and explain my approach. I was also asked how I would refactor the file for better readability and testability.
System Design Round:
The prompt was to design a platform where clients can input a set of keywords and track how their ad campaigns are performing via a dashboard. This involved discussing ingestion of keyword/ad performance data, tracking metrics over time, storing results, and surfacing KPIs on a scalable dashboard.
Didn't even get that far. Was scheduled with a recruiter, and then last minute cancelled and introduced to another person who rescheduled me with a new person. The new recruiter was outright rude and unprofessional. I then found out that my original recruiter was fired. Seems like red flags all around. Avoid.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Address my short tenure in my resume (laid off) and my career gap. Not interested in anything else.
I applied online. I interviewed at Braze (São Paulo, SP) in Jan 2026
Interview
Check the comments about toxic culture and the interview process, because this company really fits that description. The interviewers have terrible people skills and ask puzzle-style questions for a senior role.
I passed the first algorithm interview and was then scheduled for four more. The debugging interview was a complete joke and again focused on puzzle-style questions instead of real-world problems.
The interviewers don’t help when you ask questions. They are only there to judge you and make the process harder. The culture seems like they are only looking for yes-men.
Interview questions [4]
Question 1
The "debugging" interview was a Caesar cipher puzzle. Each character was shifted by some +/− offset, but the code was badly written: heavy ASCII character mapping, non-descriptive variable names, and messy logic. It felt like a trick puzzle, not real debugging work you’d do in a senior role.
The first algorithm interview was about removing fields or detecting changes in object fields. There were three questions that could basically be solved by tweaking the first solution, but they wanted me to reimplement it each time instead of reusing or adjusting what I had already written. Basically, we were counting how many changes exist between two objects recursively.
System design interview for google search, you have a list of 1 million keywords and you have to create a web scraper to search each keyword on google every day.
I interviewed at Braze (São Paulo, SP) in Dec 2025
Interview
Default interview process + debugging round: HR Interview, Coding interview, System design, Debugging interview.
Focusing on the debugging round is essential -> They expect you to be able to identify patterns and fix them on failing tests