Senior Software Engineer - Backend (Tooling)

Description

Sprout Social is looking to hire a Senior Software Engineer to the Engineering team.

Why join Sprout’s Engineering team?

With collaborative cross-functional teams that span mobile, front-end, back-end and site reliability engineering—the Sprout Engineering team is a place to sharpen your craft and solve hard problems with the smartest people in the industry. On a daily basis, we process tens of billions of requests and tens of billions of asynchronous events. We also ingest billions of social messages every day, and ship more than 1,000 production deployments every month. You’ll get to work on a “tech-giant” scale with smaller, supportive teams where every engineer has the chance to make an impact on our company, and our customers. The best part? In our industry, you often have to switch jobs or even companies to learn a new part of a tech stack or business. But at Sprout, our product is a suite, so you just need to move teams. You’re able to diversify your skills, which not only benefits your team—but also your career.

What you’ll do

• Create “Paved Roads”: standard production-ready technology that all of our engineering teams can leverage to build our customer-facing products.
• Work to improve Sprout’s security posture through automation, auditability, and clear processes in order to build sustainable and secure solutions.
• Enforce security best practices through code to minimize chances of misconfiguration and increase confidence in service adoption in the cloud.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with product, site reliability engineering, data platform, and GRC teams to deliver scalable, secure-by-default infrastructure
• Act as a multiplier: leading with influence across teams and orgs, creating momentum for cross-functional initiatives, and driving alignment on security best practices.
• Lead by example—pairing deep technical expertise with pragmatic execution and mentorship.
• Own strategic initiatives such as pre-prod testing environments, more mature observability, advanced deployment methods, and service standardization.

What you’ll bring

We’re looking for a deeply technical, creative, collaborative, pragmatic, highly motivated, and inquisitive engineer who biases for simplicity to join our team in building great tools. If you love solving hard problems, delivering and sustaining high-quality software, and confidently guiding your peers to learn from and teach each other, we’d love to talk with you!

The minimum qualifications for this role include:

• 4+ years experience developing and supporting software in a production environment
• 3+ years experience programming in an object oriented language such as Java, Python, C# or C++
• 2+ years experience working with CI/CD Pipelines using tools such as Jenkins, Gitlab, Github Actions, etc.
• Experience leading engineering projects and initiatives, including the design, development, and implementation of infrastructure systems, ensuring delivery of reliable services, prioritizing technical improvements with cross-functional teams, and/or driving technical vision.

Preferred qualifications for this role include:

• 2+ years experience with Amazon Web Services (AWS)
• Experience with one or more infrastructure-as-code or configuration-as-code tools, such as: Terraform, Chef, Ansible, SaltStack, etc.
• Experience with software delivery platforms such as Argo, Spinnaker, or Flux
• Experience with observability tools like Datadog, Sentry, or Honeycomb

How you’ll grow

Within 1 month, you’ll plant your roots, including:

• Experience Sprout’s in-depth onboarding, covering everything from our company mission and values, hearing directly from executives and founders, to deep training on our products and the value that Sprout delivers to our customers
• Make a plan with your manager to set initial priorities, align on expectations for your role, plant goalposts for your career, and learn about Sprout’s approach to site reliability engineering
• Learn about and interact with some of our core tools: Jenkins, GitHub Actions, Datadog, our in-house deploy tools, etc
• Start familiarizing yourself with how we support the SDLC and development workflows across Sprout’s engineering teams

Within 3 months, you’ll start hitting your stride by:

• Complete your first end-to-end project, such as a new GitHub Actions workflows or Datadog features
• Gain familiarity with our platform architecture and SDLC practices
• Use our observability tools to troubleshoot production performance or stability issues
• Joining our on-call rotation (don’t worry we’ve got your back!)
• Participating in code reviews and giving feedback to team members
• Contributing to our team’s culture of continuous improvement through retros and experimentation-oriented thinking
• Writing design documents for new tooling and processes, gathering feedback from peers, coordinating dependencies, and being a domain owner for a new project
• Proactively identifying, advocating for, and making high impact improvements to reduce operational toil

Within 6 months, you’ll be making a clear impact through:

• Implement new deploy tooling to help our engineers ship code faster and more safely
• Partner with product teams to deliver enable them to build, test, deploy, and observe their features to deliver a high-quality product to our customers
• Identify technical debt and performance bottlenecks within our systems, come up with a plan to improve them, and release them to production.
• Completing an impactful project that is well-baked, bug-free, and released to the whole engineering organization
• Working and communicating effectively with other groups across the organization to ensure big-picture alignment and encourage cross-team collaboration
• Forming a career growth plan with your manager and beginning to work towards it

Within 12 months, you’ll make this role your own by:

• Being the go-to expert of your teams’ systems at the company
• Owning cross-organizational projects, demonstrating project management skills, consensus building, and strong leadership
• Actively mitigating risk of failed delivery and missed deadlines through courageous, transparent communication with colleagues and stakeholders throughout a project life cycle
• Leading technical architecture meetings
• Mentoring junior engineers, helping them level up technically
• Building connections with members from other teams through active networking and community building
• Having opportunities to contribute to in-house technical presentations and workshops that share your expertise with large groups of Sprout engineers
• Surprise us! Use your unique ideas and abilities to change Sprout Engineering in beneficial ways that we haven’t even considered yet

Of course what is outlined above is the ideal timeline, but things may shift based on business needs and other projects and tasks could be added at the discretion of your manager.

Our Benefits Program

We’re proud to regularly be recognized for our team, product and culture. Our benefits program includes:

• Insurance and benefit options that are built for both individuals and families
• Progressive policies to support work/life balance, like our flexible paid time off and parental leave program 
• High-quality and well-maintained equipment—your computer will never prevent you from doing your best
• Wellness initiatives to ensure both health and mental well-being of our team
• Ongoing education and development opportunities via our Grow@Sprout program and  employee-led diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
• Growing corporate social responsibility program that is driven by the involvement and passion of our team members
• Beautiful, convenient and state-of-the-art offices in Chicago’s Loop and downtown Seattle, for those who prefer an office setting

Whenever possible, Sprout wants to provide our team with the flexibility to work in the location that makes the most sense for them. Sprout maintains a remote workforce in many places in the United States. However, we are not set up in all states, so please look at the drop-down box in our application to see whether your state is listed. Few roles require an office setting. If your position requires a physical presence in a Sprout office, it will be evident in the job listing and your offer letter.

Individual base pay is based on various factors, including work location, relevant experience and skills, the responsibility of the role, and job duties/requirements. In the United States, we have two geographic pay zones. For this role, our current base pay ranges for new hires are:

• Zone 1 (New York, California, Washington): $164,120 (min), $205,200 (mid), $246,180 (max) USD annually
• Zone 2 (All other US states): $149,200 (min), $186,500 (mid), $223,800 (max) USD annually

The listed ranges represent the full earning potential in this position. Starting salaries for well-qualified new hires are typically around the midpoint of the range. These ranges were determined by a market-based compensation approach; we used data from trusted third-party compensation sources to set equitable, consistent, and competitive ranges. We also evaluate compensation bi-annually, identify any changes in the market and make adjustments to our ranges and existing employee compensation as needed.

Base pay is only one element of an employee's total compensation at Sprout. Every Sprout team member has an opportunity to receive restricted stock units (RSUs) under Sprout’s equity plan. Employees (and their dependents) are covered by medical, dental, vision, basic life, accidental death, and dismemberment insurance, and Modern Health (a wellness benefit).  Employees are able to enroll in Sprout’s company’s 401k plan, in which Sprout will match 50% of your contributions up to 6% with a maximum contribution. Sprout offers “Flexible Paid Time Off” and ten paid holidays. We have outlined the various components to an employee’s full compensation package here to help you to understand our total rewards package.

Sprout Social is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer. We do not discriminate based on identity- race, color, religion, national origin or ancestry, sex (including sexual identity), age, physical or mental disability, pregnancy, veteran or military status, unfavorable discharge from military service, genetic information, sexual orientation, marital status, order of protection status, citizenship status, arrest record or expunged or sealed convictions, or any other legally recognized protected basis under federal, state, or local law. Because Sprout Social is a federal contractor, we affirmatively recruit individuals with a disability and protected veterans. Learn more about our commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion in our latest DEI Report.

If you require a reasonable accommodation for any part of the interview process or to submit your application, please email us at [email protected]. Include the nature of your request and your preferred contact information. We'll do everything we can to support your success during our recruitment process while upholding your privacy. Please note that only inquiries regarding accommodations will receive a response from this email address; other inquiries will not be addressed (e.g., you send your resume but are not requesting an accommodation).

For more information about our commitment to equal employment opportunity, please click here (1) Equal Opportunity Employment Poster and (2) Sprout Social's Affirmative Action Statement. 

When you apply for employment with Sprout Social, we will process your job applicant data, including your employment and education history, transcript, writing samples, and references as necessary to consider your job application for open positions. Your personal data will be shared with Greenhouse Software, Inc., and Crosschq, Inc., cloud services providers located in the United States of America and engaged by Sprout Social to help manage its recruitment and hiring process on Controller’s behalf. Accordingly, if you are located outside of the United States, by clicking “Submit Application” on this site, you consent to the transfer of your personal data to the United States. For more information about our privacy practices please visit our Privacy Policy. California residents have additional rights and should review the Additional Disclosures for California Residents section in our Privacy Policy.

Additionally, Sprout Social participates in the E-Verify program in certain locations, as required by law. 

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