How I Became a Software Engineer at Birchbox
Growing up, Becky Case took voice lessons and dreamed of moving to New York City to perform on Broadway. It wasn’t until college that she realized her love of the internet might lead to a career in computers instead. She took her first programming assignment - create a basic calculator - and personalized it to display pink and purple buttons, complete with cats in the background.
After stints at Zappos, Bonobos, and OpenSky, Becky made her way to Birchbox. Since launching in 2010, Birchbox has opened six offices around globe, many of which Becky routinely visits when working on new software projects. Here’s how Becky launched her career in a famously male-dominated industry and what it’s like to help plan the roadmap for one of the most popular beauty brands in tech.
I went to college at Georgia Southern University on a vocal performance scholarship. Toward the end of my freshman year, I was a little bit disheartened. I didn’t know if I was going to be good enough to make it and mentally, I felt unchallenged. I had the highest grade in a lot of my classes and yet I was really bored.
The only [non-voice] class I had room for that semester was an intro to basic visual programming. I signed up for it without even really knowing what it was. MySpace had just come out and everyone was on AIM, that kind of thing. I was like, “Yeah, I want to use computers; it’ll be super fun!” because I liked using the internet, which I quickly learned is very different from actually making the internet. But I ended up with the highest grade in the class. My teacher talked to me at the end of the semester and told me I’d be really good at [computer science], and that’s when I decided to officially switch my major.
After college, I was tired of living in Georgia so I decided to move to Las Vegas. My brother had lived there while I was in college. I visited him when I was about 19 and I really liked it; it was such a big change from Georgia. I waited tables for a while at a Cheesecake Factory in Caesar's Palace to pay the bills while I was looking for a gig and went to interviews when I wasn’t working
It was definitely challenging to get my first job out of college. I did myself a disservice by not interning during school. I spent most of my summers taking ridiculous amounts of math [that I didn’t take freshman year] so I could still graduate in four years. Interning is incredibly important - now, I wouldn’t look at an entry-level candidate now who doesn't have an internship.
I graduated in December 2004 and started working at a company called Meridias Capital, which wrote loan-origination software, in the fall of 2005. It was a good learning environment. My boss was nice and supportive, but he didn’t exclude me from a meeting because I was too junior. I would sit in meetings with the COO and the CEO and talk to them about what we were building and how we were going to build it.
I had been there for about two years when I went to work one day and my boss said the whole company didn’t have jobs anymore. When Lehman Brothers [which owned Meridias Capital] went bankrupt in 2008, they took my company [down] with them. It was very traumatic. I started putting my résumé out there, and people were very interested in me because I had experience.
Zappos hired me as a senior software engineer on the merchandising and planning team. I wrote really cool software for them - the pricing engine I wrote was my most senior project. Zappos has a bunch of white-label sites, or sites that Zappos runs for other shoe companies. The pricing engine controlled what products were being sold on each website. And it also did sale pricing, like when we wanted to apply mark-offs for a summer sale. That was my big foray into hardcore enterprise engineering.
I loved working at Zappos but eventually I wanted to leave Las Vegas. One of the engineering managers at Zappos took a CTO role for Bonobos, an e-commerce company for men’s apparel in New York, and he hired me shortly after. I was the only backend engineer, so everything I did was critical to the company. After that, I worked at Open Sky, a celebrity-curated shopping site, for about a year and a half. It was fun; I got to take my dog with me to work every day, which was awesome.
At that point [in 2011], I was a little burnt out from engineering. I had some money saved up, so I quit my job and took some time off. I decided to go to Australia for three weeks, but by the time I got back, I wanted to have a job lined up. I got lucky. I heard Birchbox had an open position and I was immediately like, I want that.
I had been interviewing for three weeks [before I left], and Birchbox was the last interview on the list. The CTO was a woman and I was really impressed with her. Culture comes first [for me], but the technology Birchbox was working on was amazing too. They offered me a job at the end of the day - a day or two before I left. I was able to enjoy my vacation and not worry about the future. When I finally got back stateside, I felt energized and pumped to start my new job.
I like that Birchbox is a beauty company but I also primarily like that it’s a very female-friendly company. I’ve worked at some companies that are not super friendly to female engineers. Someone will say to me, “You don’t look like an engineer,” which is incredibly rude for one thing, but then it also means I have to work harder to prove I’m just as smart as you are, just because I don’t look like a stereotypical engineer.
Examples [from some past jobs] come to mind. I was running late to work one morning. Two of my coworkers thought it'd be funny to have one person send an email to our entire team asking where I was and then have the other reply I was likely late because I was blowing out my hair. As the only woman on the team, I was a bit annoyed. Another example happened at cocktail event for techies. I was talking to some people who worked at a very well-known social media company. When I told them I was a software engineer, the team's manager didn't believe me and starting quizzing me on programming terms. It was incredibly insulting.
It got to the point where I started to dumb down how I looked for interviews. I’d show up in jeans, boots, my hair in a ponytail, a sweater, and very little makeup, just because people would react better. It’s awful. I think that we’ve come a long way and it’s more accepting for girls to [be feminine], but it was definitely a problem.
When I first started [at Birchbox], there were four engineers. It was a very small team; we only had one vertical, women’s, and the first project I did right out of the gate was launch Birchbox Man in April 2012. Because of the timeline and the learning curve, it was probably the hardest project I’ve ever done. I had just joined so I was trying to learn all of the systems while working on a tight deadline to get everything done. In the end, it was a great experience for me. Some of my best memories at the company are from that early time. Even to this day, whenever [my coworkers and I] meet for drinks, we’re like, “Remember when we did that project and we worked and slept in the office for weeks on end?” I do not recommend doing that and I, in fact, will never do it again. Half the code we wrote during that time we had to rewrite. When you’re sleep-deprived, you don’t do a very good job!
Birchbox acquired a company called Jolie Box in Europe in 2012, and we needed to merge their tech team [with ours]. I really like digging into new code bases and throwing myself in to see what I can find. So they sent me over to Paris.
When I'm in the [international] offices, they speak English for me, for which I'm forever grateful. I took French in high school and a class when we acquired JolieBox, but I'm still very much a beginner. My best phrase is "Qu'est est le mot de pass pour le Wi-Fi, s'il vous plaît?" - "What is the password for the Wi-Fi, please?"
When you acquire a company, you have all of their code over there, you have all of your code over here, and if you don’t merge them together, you’re now working on two different things. If I want to launch a new feature, I have to code it twice. [My boss] basically was like, “Scope [merging them] out and deliver it on a timeline. Tell me how long it’s going to take - but once you give me an estimate, you need to hit it and it needs to have no large bugs in it. It has to be flawless.”
It also required coordinating with Jolie Box offices, teaching them how to use the new tooling, figuring out their business priorities and how to fit that into our current platform. It was a huge project and it took me about five months to do. I was promoted to director of engineering, international. That was a big moment for me. [Birchbox CEO and co-founder] Katia even sent me flowers.
I've been to Paris for work three times now. I've been to Barcelona and London more times than I can remember. I visit the foreign offices a few times a year - enough that it's fun but not so much that I'm always traveling. My biggest takeaway is that [even though] you're going somewhere glamorous, it's work. There are no siestas in Spain, no breaks at 4 p.m. for tea, and in Paris, we did not stop every hour to smoke cigarettes and drink espresso.
When we finally globalized, I started working on our core software team. [Editor's note: Core tech is the foundation that all of the other software is built on. Unlike front-end code, which controls the look, feel, and behavior of a page, the backend core code runs everything behind the scenes.] Our VP of engineering was running it and he slowly started to give me more of it. And then in the summer of 2016, I became the director of engineering, core platform and international.
The most challenging part of my job now is time management. My to-do list on any given day is 17 things long. I’ll cross off everything and the next morning, I’ll make a new to-do list that’s 17 things again. Our VP of engineering left in October and I’ve taken on a lot of his roles, so I’ve been gunning for a VP position. And my current boss does know that, so we’ll see! [Editor's note: This interview was conducted before March 7, when Becky was promoted to VP of Engineering at Birchbox.]
I feel like I’ve come full circle in a way - I’m in an office band at Birchbox, so I still get to sing. One of the guys who works on our subscription operations team had a college band. He brought his equipment in to the office and stores it in a room. We have a drum set, multiple guitars, mic stands, mics, everything. Every Tuesday after work, we meet up and drag it out. So now, I feel like I can work at my dream job, which is Birchbox, and also live out my childhood dream.
Interested in learning to code? Birchbox partnered with Flatiron School in New York City to give women who want to work in tech half-tuition scholarships for its online web developer program. Learn more here.
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