Backend Software Engineer, Sprout Social

• We’re looking for a creative, collaborative, highly motivated, and inquisitive learner to help us deliver a great product to our customers
• If you’re passionate about building and scaling reliable systems, we’d love to talk with you!
• 3 years experience developing and supporting software in a production environment
• 3 years experience programming in object oriented languages such as Java, C#, Python, or C++

Desirable

• 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
• Write clean, well-tested and reviewable code, leveraging technologies such as Java, Python, MySQL, NSQ, Hbase, AWS, and Kubernetes
• Partner with product managers, designers, and other engineers to define requirements, complete feature work, and identify blockers
• Own the code you write and deploy to production, including identifying and communicating risks or issues
• Review pull requests and design documents from peers, while recognizing and applying established code patterns and best practices
• Within 1 month, you’ll plant your roots, including:
• Complete Sprout Social’s new hire training & onboarding program alongside other new Sprout team members. You’ll gain a broader understanding of our products and how your role fits into the organization
• Deploy and make changes to our production systems
• Interact with SQL or NoSQL data stores and messaging queues
• Collaborate regularly with product managers and other product teams to deliver value to our users
• Get regular team feedback on your work through code reviews and pairing
• Proactively monitor the health of our services in production to ensure our customers always have a world-class experience
• Within 3 months, you’ll start hitting your stride by:
• Work with your team to create and prioritize quarterly team goals
• Contribute to our Agile culture of continuous improvement through retrospective meetings and experimentation-oriented thinking
• Build connections with members from other teams through guild meetings and chapter outings
• Participate in technical design meetings with your teammates to walk through new feature ideas and system improvements
• Work with product managers, UX developers, and front-end engineers to come up with the MVPs of new features
• Be the first line of defense against product outages and bugs while on support duty
• Maintain, scale, and build upon systems that handle hundreds of thousands of messages a day
• Within 6 months, you’ll be making clear impact through:
• Create, deploy, and manage resilient systems
• Build your engineering skills by attending in-house presentations, workshops, and training sessions
• Form a career growth plan with your manager and work towards it
• Decompose work into small, similarly sized units so that estimation is unnecessary
• Identify technical debt and performance bottlenecks within our systems, come up with a plan to improve the code, and get it pushed to production
• Within 12 months, you’ll make this role your own by:
• Integrate and use monitoring and alerting tools to know about problems before our users
• Participate in architecture discussions with senior team members
• Be “point person” on a project, including writing design documents, coordinating dependencies, and acting as domain owner
• Actively mitigate risk of failed delivery and missed deadlines through courageous, transparent communication with colleagues and stakeholders throughout a project life cycle
• Demonstrate ownership over the codebase, from design to maintenance and everything in between