How Braze’s CTO is rethinking engineering for the agentic area

How Braze’s CTO is rethinking engineering for the agentic area - Stack Overflow

Stack Overflow Business Stack Internal: the knowledge intelligence layer that powers enterprise AI.Stack Data Licensing: decades of verified, technical knowledge to boost AI performance and trust.Stack Ads: engage developers where it matters — in their daily workflow.Jon Hyman, co-founder and CTO of Braze, joins Stack Overflow CPTO Jody Bailey on Leaders of Code to share how he's led the company's engineering organization over nearly 15 years of growth — and how they transformed into an AI-first team in just a few months.Jon explains some pivotal moments where his thinking shifted (watching his team ship an MCP server six weeks ahead of schedule will do that!) and talks candidly about the cultural and practical challenges of driving adoption across a 300-person engineering org. He explains how model quality, not mandates, was the key factor in winning over skeptics, and why over 60% of Braze's committed code is now AI-generated.Jon also addresses the harder questions: how to measure AI's real business value, the surprisingly steep cost of inference at scale, why "vibe-coding your way to scale" is folly, and what comes next as autonomous agents start building features overnight.Connect with Jon on LinkedIn.TRANSCRIPTEira May:Hello and welcome to Leaders of Code. If this is your first time joining us, this is a segment on The Stack Overflow Podcast where we get senior engineering leaders together and we talk about the work they're doing, how they build their teams and the biggest challenges they're dealing with right now. My name is Eira May. I'm the B2B editor at Stack Overflow, and I'm here with Jody Bailey, who is chief of product and technology here at Stack.Jody, thank you for joining us again.Jody Bailey:Oh, my pleasure. Great to be here and excited to talk to Jon and learn all the things he's up to.Eira May:Yes, me too. So our guest today is Jon Hyman. He is co-founder and CTO of Braze, which is a customer engagement platform that I have to say is very well loved by our marketing team.Jon, welcome to the show.Jonathan Hyman:Hi there. Thank you so much for having me on the podcast.Eira May:Jon, I wanted to ask you, you've been at Braze for over a decade, I think. So you've taken it from startup to global leader. When you think about your definition of good engineering leadership and what that entails, how has your understanding of that changed over time?Jonathan Hyman:So you're exactly right. We founded the company almost 15 years ago, and so that is basically a lifetime in technology. It's been really exciting to be from the birth of mobile and really the growth of that and build a business that was catalyzed by the changes to the world for mobile and now be at the time of being in a world that's being catalyzed and changed by AI and see the transformation on our business in both directions of that. If I look to the mobile aspect of it, one of the big things that was a driver from the engineering side was just how much scale and speed you needed in order to operate in the mobile world. When businesses decided to operate in the mobile space, they gained access to a global audience and users wanted to be able to interact with them whenever they wanted, and they demanded interactivity as their definition for real time.And I always used to say to folks, "You've got high responsibility now. You have a device in my pocket you can talk to me through. When I'm with my friends or family or with my wife, you need to say something that's really important." And so when I think about that from the engineering aspect of it and the lessons that I've just learned, I think it's just really crucial that engineers and engineering managers just have a strong understanding of how to scale and how their product really works.For me, being involved with the technical underpinnings and the technical architecture of the products since day one has let me be very effective as a leader. I often refer to myself as a on the ground general. I'm not in the Pentagon, just waiting in the back. I'm literally out with the troops, able to understand the operational challenges that we have, the complexities and difficulties we may be running into with a new feature or a new product space, or really just help ultimately scale together. And I think that aspect has been very important to my ability to be effective and motivating for the team.And when I look even now to the AI aspect of it, I think the same is true of I'm getting my hands deep in AI, launching all sorts of agents. I'm sure we'll talk about it later on the podcast. And I have a lot of my own point of view and perspective and able to go toe to toe with some of our best builders who are building really cool pipelines and setting up great automations and using AI to change their workflow. And my proficiency and understanding of that has allowed me to continue to just be effective in conversations, I think, as I said, be motivating to folks.Jody Bailey:Y'all have grown a ton over 15 years, right? I assume the leadership style and what you need to do has evolved with that. How do you lead leaders differently than the ICs and then maintain that balance of being able to go toe to toe, so to speak?Jonathan Hyman:Well, we've certainly had to evolve our organization a lot as we would get best the point of everyone being able to be in the same room and understand what folks are working on. And specialization was a big part of that. When we think about how we organized ourselves originally, sure, like many startups, you just had a pool of engineers and then you would go into separating into say front end or backend engineers.But at that point in time, early on in our company's existence with engineers who could work on anything, or product managers would work on anything. And we referred to the prioritization challenge that we would face to build new things as a Sudoku problem where you needed to get front end engineers or backend engineers and product managers and designers to offer up their schedules and align together in order to build something. And we very quickly ran into problems there that led us into teams and now a divisional structure where we have engineering managers who report up into directors of product spaces that report up into VPs of divisions that ultimately report up to me and our SVP of engineering and our chief product officer. And the evolution here has just been that engineering managers and as you go up that chain need to manage increasingly levels of complexity and lead work streams beyond just the day-to-day operations of the team.And when we get to say the divisional leaders, we meet with all of our division leads on a weekly basis. And those are the ones where they've got to be leaders through goal setting, through architecture and design review. We're asking them to articulate visions for large sectors of the business. And so on one hand, I'm having conversations with the division leads around what ought they be building, what and how they should think about their product areas. Do they need to be improving the product health of a product space? Do they need to be going for adoption of features? Do they need to be going for driving monetization of those features? Ultimately, what are we doing here? How competitive is our product in the market?But I also like to do, as you were coming out, Jody, at the engineering side, that you kind of got to get deep down into the weeds sometimes in order to know how effective the team is being. And for me as a leader, I've even seen this be effective at times when you're working with engineers on estimates, trying to break the back of a problem. So a lot of times where folks, they maybe aim too high, they think about a problem a little bit too large and aren't seeing the force for the trees and all the positions there.And you can just kind of come in and say, "Wait, this doesn't make sense to me. I don't understand why we can't do it this way." And then being able to actually prototype it myself can also help, as I said, break that back of that problem and show a team the path forward and be able to then let their leader take it from there and be able to usher it forward.Jody Bailey:I assume you're leveraging AI to help with that rapid prototyping for those conversations. Is that a fair assumption?Jonathan Hyman:Yeah. The explosion of AI has been really cool to see as we've evolved to here at Braze. And I'm just in awe of how fast we've gone from AI is helping us auto complete code to AI is a junior software engineer who we can give guidance and direction to and it can do some stuff to AI is now a senior software engineer that doesn't need as much guidance in order to now us thinking about how we can use AI automatically to build things in response to triggers. If a bug report comes in, can we automatically have AI submit a pull request in order to fix that? If we have a pull request that goes up and there are test failures, can AI just automatically fix that so the engineer doesn't need to do those things? There's a lot of automation that we're just starting to get there and it's just so early innings, but in the last three months, we've just completely transformed how we're doing engineering at Braze to put AI in front of every way in which we're approaching projects.Jody Bailey:Three months teams quick, especially given the company's age, 15 years old. How did you make that happen? How did you go from code complete to autonomous agents?Jonathan Hyman:So if we look back at the AI track record here, for a long time, the AI state of the art was really code completion. And so we had these great JetBrains IDEs doing some good code tab completion. We're early adopters of GitHub Copilot, which also brought in doing a bit of code completion and asking a little bit about the code. And when Claude Code came out at the end of February of 2025, that for me was a big game-changing moment. I remember playing with it about six or seven da