Engineering Team at Braid

Braid is the easiest way to share money. Our flexible, shared accounts are bank-agnostic and designed to work for short- and long-term uses: roommates, families, couples, friends, and more. We believe there should be more flexibility, personalization, and transparency in the financial products we all use each day and we want to enable new ways to share and spend money, together.

Job Openings at Braid

Top Engineering Values

Each team is asked to select, explain, and rank their top 8 values in order of importance.
  • Wears Many Hats

    We are a small startup, and each member of our team plays multiple roles.

    We are still an early-stage company with less than ten employees and we’re looking for people who are excited by the breadth of work they'll get to do here. As an engineer, you'll not only work across the entire stack, but you’ll also be involved in initiatives and projects that fall outside of the traditional “software engineering” scope.


    We don't yet have a dedicated Head of Growth, Head of Customer Support, or many other important roles. At our current stage, all team members are involved in all aspects of the business: we discuss growth strategies, answer support emails, and are all responsible for staying compliant. One of the most important qualifiers for working at Braid is an excitement around tackling different business and technical needs. If you’re interested in seeing a startup at the very earliest stage – because you want to broaden your skills, you enjoy working on different projects, or you’d like to create your own startup at some point, Braid would probably be a good fit. No background in finance or fintech is required.

  • Customer Comes First

    Consumers don’t want yet another financial product, they want tools to help them live the life they want.

    Before we wrote any code, we focused on a painful problem we knew we could solve in a new and elegant way. The problem is one that everyone has experienced: sharing money in a way that doesn’t involve a joint bank account. Through the experience of building an app for ourselves, we realized that startlingly few financial products take a customer-first approach. Financial products tend to focus on maximizing profit first, and solving problems second. Much of finance is very prescribed, rigid, and sterile. However, banking and consumer finance will go through major changes over the next decade, and we believe the bank of the future won’t look or feel like a bank at all. Instead, we believe it will look and feel like a consumer tech product.


    As a team, one of our core strengths is our collective experience building consumer technology products. We’ve spent time building products at Rdio, Etsy, NFL, Playstation, Coursera, Google, and eBay, and hold a deep sense of respect and deference for our customers.

  • Creative + Innovative

    We appreciate people who enjoy drifting from right brain to left brain and back again.

    We believe our varied, windy-path backgrounds and personal creative projects will help us build a more human product. Some of our personal passion projects outside of the office include producing music, editing a novel, and DJ’ing large events.


    We hope to emphasize to future team members that creativity is important to cultivate and embrace in both work and personal pursuits. It helps us widen our perspective not only around product development, but around company building, too.

  • Continuous Delivery

    One of our core engineering principles is to minimize drift.

    We mindfully decrease drift between our development branches and master, between production and master, and between what we are building and what our users are using. In order to do so, we practice continuous delivery. Master is automatically deployed to production, and new mobile builds are pushed to a limited distribution group on every commit.


    We run tests on every branch via CircleCI and we have protected branches turned on in GitHub that require tests go green before merge to make sure every merge is a success. We also actively monitor our production environment using Bugsnag and other tools to fix bugs as close to immediately as possible.

  • Actively Practices Inclusion

    We see our small size as an opportunity to build a diverse team from day one.

    Our internal view on inclusion is “Do More.” It’s not enough to post a job on a few under-represented job boards, we need to have an end-to-end process that feels inclusive. It’s not enough to survey potential hires about their interviewing experience, we need to implement their suggestions. Inclusion is not about headcount, it’s about creating an environment where everyone feels confident and heard.


    We think inclusion must span across not only our hiring practices or internal culture, but also bleed into the product itself. Twenty-first century relationships are shifting in many different ways, and we want to design our product to embrace such shifts. For example, millennials are marrying later, or not at all, and fewer couples get joint bank accounts. Rising rents in major urban areas means many people live with roommates longer. We want to design our product to accommodate these macro lifestyle shifts and make our product useful for any lifestyle.

  • Promotes from Within

    We believe in taking risks on people and developing careers from within.

    We take risks on people, because we know that as an employee, you are taking a huge risk on us, too. This is why we welcome hires from non-traditional backgrounds, and why we’re open to contract-to-hire arrangements. We don’t believe job descriptions are dogma. If you’re excited about what we’re building but think only a few items in a job description apply to you, we encourage you to apply. Amanda, one of our co-founders, adds, “I want to emphasize this, especially to any women who are considering applying for a role. Study after study shows that women will wait until they feel 100% qualified for a position before applying. Please don’t do that with us.”


    We’ve cemented our belief in promoting from within at past companies, where we’ve helped interns and junior hires take on more responsibilities and grow into more senior roles. We want new members of our team to believe they can grow at Braid.

  • Fast-Paced Environment

    The consumer payments industry moves painfully slow, but we don’t have to.

    We want to build a best-in-class P2P payments experience while making sure to keep our users’ personal and financial data secure. Because consumer payments is a heavily regulated industry, it tends to move slowly. That is changing thanks to a handful of new financial infrastructure companies (Plaid, Alloy and VGS, for example) that streamline data security and compliance in new and exciting ways. We can leverage these new infrastructure offerings to our advantage, to help us move faster on the product side while still maintaining incredibly high standards for data security and compliance.

  • Continuous Feedback

    Timely feedback is a cornerstone of building a cohesive team.

    We believe feedback must be delivered directly, and aim to do so across all of the communication channels we use: in person, and via Slack, Github, Height, and Zoom. We provide review on every pull request, have design reviews each week, and have a weekly check-in where everyone at Braid is encouraged to bring up any issues to the group, whether about the product, the company, or anything else. We also make it clear to everyone on the team that feedback should be delivered individually at any time.


    When giving feedback, we encourage everyone to:

    • Be specific about not only the “what” but also the “why” - what’s the underlying reason for this piece of feedback?
    • Allow the conversation to be two-way - give the recipient a chance to respond to your feedback, whether it’s positive or constructive.
    • Assume good intent - and that we are all here because of our shared goals.
    • Be timely - feedback is best when delivered right away.

Values

  • Wears Many Hats
  • Customer Comes First
  • Creative + Innovative
  • Continuous Delivery
  • Actively Practices Inclusion
  • Promotes from Within
  • Fast-Paced Environment
  • Continuous Feedback

Company Properties

  • B2C
  • Technical Founder(s)

Team Members

  • 1 Design Director
  • 2 Founders (CEO, CTO)
  • 4 Full-Stack Engineers

Vacation Policy

We offer three weeks of paid vacation per year. We’ve worked at companies in the past that offered unlimited vacation, and believe those policies encourage employees to do the opposite.

Tech Stack

Frontend is React Native for mobile, and we’re experimenting with React Native Web on the web side.

Backend is currently Java deployed using Kubernetes, but we have a polyglot approach to problem solving, and we will likely end up with a backend that reflects that.

Interview Process

1. One 20-minute intro call to give a full overview of Braid and hear more about you.

2. One one-hour meeting at our office.

3. Four one-hour meetings either in person or via video conference with the rest of the team.

We try to get back to candidates quickly, and if it’s not a fit, we’ll offer the candidate feedback via email.