Built with ❤️ in Boston
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Hi! I’m Brandon (@bread 🍞on Slack; also my IRL nickname), lead engineer for Drift’s chat widget — a real-time messaging app installed on 100,000+ websites that enables businesses to have meaningful conversations with potential buyers. 💁🏻💬
My Role at Drift
As a member of the Chat Team, I’m directly responsible for creating a frictionless, real-time buying experience. ⌚️🤗💸 I’m also responsible for optimizing user-workflows inside Drift’s agent-facing messaging app — a high-volume, multiplayer counterpart to the chat widget — used by Sales and Marketing teams to have real-time conversations with potential buyers. 👩🏽💻👨🏼💻
Opportunities Abound
Since joining Drift in January 2018, I’ve also been a core contributor to 2 major product launches. 🚀🚀
1. Conversational Advertising
The keynote product announcement at Hypergrowth 2018 that enables Marketers to drive ad traffic directly to conversations powered by Drift without installing any code. 🙅💻
2. Drift for Sales
The April 2018 Marketable Moment that enables Sales Reps to close deals faster by sharing their calendar when emailing prospects via Gmail using the Drift Chrome Extension. 📅💸
This is NOT NORMAL
It’s probably clear to you now that opportunities abound at Drift — this is not normal, but Drift is not normal. Working at Drift is the opportunity of a lifetime — we’re transforming the way businesses buy from businesses and we’re experiencing unprecedented growth. Drift is growing faster than B2B unicorns such as Salesforce, ServiceNow, Workday, and Zendesk, among others. For Drift employees, this means unprecedented career growth if you’re willing to take control of your future.
Joining Drift
From my first phone call with Co-founder and CTO, Elias Torres, I knew working at Drift would be different. I asked him to check out my portfolio, and I could tell he was immediately sold. He paid attention to the details of my Design work and watched closely as I walked him through a location-based app I’d built for the interview. I called out some of my work that I knew was weak, and he agreed, offering up some other observations about what could change. It didn’t feel much like an interview anymore, just a couple of teammates talking about how to improve a product experience. He believed in what he was seeing and decided to give me an opportunity. 🤝
“You want the widget? Sure, the widget’s yours,” Elias said casually. “We do 3-person engineering teams here: 2 engineers and Tech Lead.” He drew 3 circles on the whiteboard forming a tree. “When a team grows, you have 50% chance of becoming Tech Lead.” He drew up new tree with one of the engineers from the previous tree as the new Tech Lead.
With this single conversation, I’d go from feeling underutilized, bored, and disillusioned, to feeling energized, appreciated, and grateful. 🙏🙏🙏
THE Place to Work
Since graduating college in 2015 with no internships under my belt, I’d bounced between a couple of IT-focused, Boston-based B2B startups: an Alpha Project at Cisco where we created a platform that simplifies security policy management 🔒✔️ and CloudHealth Technologies — recently acquired by VMware [NYSE: VMW] — a cloud management platform focused on resource and cost optimization. ☁️⚡💸 While both of these organizations gave me an amazing start to my career, neither satiated my craving for building consumer-grade product experiences.
Then along came Drift and the team that rewards engineers for aiming high, sweating the details, and delivering a best-in-class, consumer-grade product experience to hundreds of thousands of users. 💅🏻👀🔬 Drift is THE place to work if you live in Boston and want to build amazing, customer-centric products while shipping at an incredible pace.
Our Tech is 🔥
On a more technical note, Drift’s UI is powered by a modern, micro frontend architecture — new applications go from zero to live in a matter of minutes, batteries included. 🔋🏎 Drift engineers enjoy a consistent developer experience across 10+ repos built with React, Redux, Webpack, RxJS, Immutable, and more. We have some ridiculously talented backend engineers 👩🏿🔬👨🏽🔧who build the systems that power dozens of Drift products and make our frontend friends happy. 😁😃😍
Our Culture is 🔥🔥
It’s also worth noting that employees have a straight up good time working at Drift, even in the face of challenges. Every single employee on the now 180+ person team is incredibly self-aware, supportive, and wants you to be wildly successful — there are no egos. We bookend each week with 2 meetings: Monday Metrics at 9:30am where we discuss wins and goals for the week, and Show & Tell on Friday at 4:00pm where we come together as one team to share stories from the week (no boring presentations, demos, or out-of-touch gimmicks). These attitudes, ceremonies, and people are what define the Drift brand. It’s hard to capture in writing, so you’ll just have to come along and see for yourself. 🌝
Sound like fun? Join up! We’re growing the Chat Team (and every other team at Drift) and are looking for talented Software Engineers, Designers, PMs, and Leaders who want to be part of building the new way businesses buy from businesses. Email me at bread@drift.com or message me at linkedin.com/in/brandonread. Always open to coffee, brunch, ice-cream — whatever! Chat soon :)
