Brex

Brex set out to reinvent corporate finance from scratch. Corporate cards with no personal guarantee, built for startups. Then spend management. Then global payments. Then an AI-powered finance platform. The ambition has always been larger than the initial product — and under Henrique Dubugras and Pedro Franceschi, who founded Brex as 20-year-olds out of Stanford, the company has grown into one of the most important fintech companies in the market.

Brex and Ramp are the two companies most often discussed in the same breath in this space. Both are doing well. The cultures are different.

Who they're hiring

Brex hires across engineering, product, and go-to-market. Engineering is organized around:

• Fintech platform — banking infrastructure, payment rails, ledger systems, card network integrations
• AI and automation — Brex's AI finance platform, expense automation, intelligent spend management
• Developer platform — APIs, SDKs, and integrations for customers who want to embed Brex into their systems
• Data and ML — credit risk modeling, fraud detection, financial intelligence
• Product engineering — the consumer-facing products across web and mobile

On GTM: Brex has rebuilt its go-to-market around mid-market and enterprise after pivoting away from pure startup focus. There's a real sales org, customer success, and solutions engineering function.

The process

Standard fintech process at Brex's scale:

1. Recruiter screen
2. Technical screen — coding, typically algorithms-focused
3. Hiring manager conversation
4. Onsite loop — 4-5 rounds: coding, systems design, product sense, behavioral
5. Offer

For fintech-specific roles (payments, credit, ledger), expect questions about financial systems: double-entry bookkeeping, payment network architecture, ledger design. Brex builds real banking infrastructure and hires engineers who can engage with that domain.

What the culture is actually like

Brex is a high-performance culture with a genuinely global sensibility — Dubugras and Franceschi are Brazilian, and that's influenced how the company operates internationally and who it's attracted. There are meaningful teams in New York, San Francisco, and Vancouver, and the company has built a distributed engineering culture that works.

The ambition is large and the pace reflects it. Brex has pivoted meaningfully (away from early-stage startups, into mid-market and enterprise) and the culture has had to adapt to those pivots. People who are adaptable and can operate during strategic shifts do well; people who need stability find it harder.

The founders are visible, technically credible (Dubugras was CTO before transitioning to CEO), and have strong opinions about the product. The engineering culture reflects founder influence — there's a real care about product quality and technical craft.

What they look for

Fintech domain curiosity. Brex builds on payment networks, banking APIs, and financial infrastructure. You don't need to be a finance expert, but genuine curiosity about how money moves through systems is helpful.

Scale-aware engineering. Brex processes substantial transaction volumes with strict correctness requirements. Engineers who think about reliability, consistency, and what happens when financial systems fail are valued.

Adaptability. The company has made significant strategic shifts and will likely make more. People who are energized by evolution rather than destabilized by it tend to fit the culture.

Enterprise product sensibility. The pivot to mid-market and enterprise means the product decisions are increasingly shaped by what CFOs and finance teams need. Engineers and PMs who can engage with that context build better things there.

Things worth knowing

The Brex vs. Ramp question comes up often. Both are great companies. The cultures are different: Brex has more of a global, design-forward sensibility; Ramp is more intensely operationally focused. Which fits you better is worth thinking about if you're evaluating both.

The pivot away from early-stage startups was real. Brex famously told startup customers to leave in 2022 and refocused on mid-market and enterprise. That strategic clarity has made the business stronger, but it was a significant and visible bet. Understanding that pivot — why it happened and what it says about where the company is going — is relevant background.

Remote is real. Unlike some fintech peers, Brex has maintained a genuinely distributed engineering team. If you want to work at a fintech company without being in NYC or SF full-time, Brex is one of the more viable options.

The AI finance angle. Brex's current product direction — AI-powered finance operations, automated expense categorization, intelligent approvals — is a real differentiation play. If you're building AI features into financial workflows, the Brex product direction is interesting.

Should you apply?

Brex is a strong fit for engineers who want to work on fintech infrastructure, care about product quality, and are comfortable with a company that's still defining its long-term position. The founders are credible, the business is real, and the technical problems are hard. If the corporate finance and payments domain genuinely interests you, Brex is one of the better places to be in the space.