Braze Lead Developer

Role Summary

We are seeking a hands-on Braze Lead Developer to build, integrate, and scale Braze solutions for enterprise clients. You will lead a team of developers while remaining deeply hands-on: configuring Braze, building Canvas journeys and personalized content, implementing SDKs and APIs, and engineering data integrations with CDPs, reverse ETL tools, product analytics, and cloud data warehouses (Hightouch, Amperity, Amplitude, Snowflake, and similar). You will own technical quality on implementations and migrations, enforce development standards, collaborate closely with client teams, and contribute reusable code assets to the practice.

Key Responsibilities

Braze Build & Development

• Configure and build Braze workspaces end to end, including data model, custom attributes and events, currencies, catalogs, and multi-brand / multi-region setups.
• Develop and maintain integrations between Braze, CDPs, data warehouses, and source systems using batch, streaming, and API-driven patterns.
• Build, test, and deploy Canvas Flow journeys across email, push, in-app, SMS, WhatsApp, Content Cards, and webhooks.
• Write and optimize personalization logic using Liquid, Connected Content, Catalogs, Content Blocks, and Braze AI features (Intelligent Timing, Intelligent Selection, predictive models).
• Perform code and configuration reviews, troubleshoot production issues, and tune performance and rate limits for high-volume sends.

Data, Identity & Integration Engineering

• Implement identity resolution in Braze, including external ID management, anonymous-to-known user merges, and alias handling.
• Build warehouse-native activation pipelines using Snowflake with Hightouch or Census, Braze Cloud Data Ingestion, and Snowflake Data Sharing.
• Integrate Amperity for identity stitching, unified profiles, and audience activation into Braze.
• Develop bidirectional data flows with Amplitude (events, cohorts, predictions) and configure Currents to stream engagement data back to the warehouse.
• Implement event taxonomy, schema validation, and data-quality checks across the stack.
• Implement consent, subscription, and preference management in line with GDPR, CCPA, TCPA, CAN-SPAM, and HIPAA where applicable.

Technical Delivery & Quality

• Lead hands-on technical delivery for implementation, migration, and optimization programs, including migrations from Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Iterable, Klaviyo, Adobe Campaign, or Oracle Responsys.
• Implement and guide Braze SDK integration (iOS, Android, Web), API usage, CI/CD for Braze assets, environment management, and QA/testing.
• Execute deliverability setup, including IP warm-up, domain authentication (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), BIMI, and sender reputation monitoring.
• Set up experiments (A/B, multivariate, holdouts) and the tracking needed to measure lift, LTV, churn, and ROI.
• Maintain technical documentation, runbooks, and release processes for client marketing technology teams.

Team Leadership & Client Collaboration

• Work with client marketing, product, and engineering teams to translate requirements into technical designs and development tasks.
• Provide technical estimates, solution inputs, and demos to support proposals and pre-sales.
• Build reusable code libraries, Liquid templates, Canvas templates, and integration accelerators for the EXL Braze practice.
• Lead and mentor developers and campaign specialists through code reviews, pairing, and Braze certification.

Required Skills & Qualifications

Braze Expertise

• 5+ years hands-on Braze development experience, including leading the build on at least two enterprise implementations or migrations.
• Strong hands-on skills in Canvas Flow, segmentation, Liquid, Connected Content, Catalogs, Content Blocks, and Braze AI capabilities.
• Practical experience implementing Braze SDKs, REST API, SCIM, export endpoints, webhooks, Currents, Cloud Data Ingestion, and Snowflake Data Sharing.
• Strong understanding of Braze rate limits, data points, and cost / performance optimization.
• Braze certification (Developer or Architect) strongly preferred.

CDP & Data Platform Experience

Hightouch - Reverse ETL; audience builder and models; Braze destination syncs; sync monitoring, alerting, and identity handling

CDP - Identity resolution and stitching; unified customer profiles; segmentation; activation to marketing channels

Amplitude - Behavioral analytics; cohorts, funnels, retention; event instrumentation; cohort sync and event streaming with Braze

Other (plus) - Segment, mParticle, RudderStack, Census, Fivetran, dbt, Airflow, Databricks, BigQuery, Redshift

Candidates should have strong working depth in at least two of the four named platforms and conversational fluency in the rest.

Technical Skills

• Advanced SQL; working proficiency in Python or JavaScript / Node.js for integrations and automation.
• Strong grasp of REST APIs, JSON, webhooks, event-driven and streaming architectures (Kafka, Kinesis, or similar).
• Experience with a major cloud platform (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and infrastructure basics such as IAM, secrets, and networking.
• Familiarity with Git, CI/CD, and environment promotion practices for marketing assets and data pipelines.
• HTML/CSS for responsive email development and in-app / Content Card templates.

Domain & Leadership Skills

• Deep knowledge of lifecycle marketing, personalization, customer segmentation, and retention strategy.
• Experience in industries such as Communications, Media, Entertainment, Sports, healthcare, retail / e-commerce, or travel & hospitality.
• Strong client-facing communication; ability to explain technical design choices to both technical and business audiences.
• Proven ability to lead and mentor distributed development teams in agile, client-facing delivery environments.

Preferred Qualifications

• Exposure to AI / ML-driven personalization, predictive churn, next-best-action, and generative AI content workflows.
• Background in consent management platforms, privacy engineering, and data governance frameworks.
• Experience building executive dashboards in Tableau, Power BI, or Looker.

Education

Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, Data Science, Marketing Technology, or a related field.