Staff Site Reliability Engineer, Sprout Social

• We are looking for a creative, collaborative, highly motivated, and pragmatic engineer to help us design and build reliable, scalable, performant systems that empower engineers to rapidly and safely deliver value to our customers
• If this sounds like you and you want to be on a team that has a huge impact across all of engineering, we’d love to talk with you!
• 7+ years building and maintaining reliable, scalable systems in a Linux/UNIX environment
• 5+ years experience with one or more infrastructure-as-code or configuration-as-code tools, such as: Terraform, Chef, Ansible, SaltStack, etc
• 3+ years experience operating, configuring, and maintaining Kubernetes clusters
• Experience in at least one programming language, such as Python, Java, Golang, or Ruby

Desirable

• Sprout Social is looking to hire a Staff Site Reliability Engineer to the Engineering team
• With collaborative cross-functional teams that span mobile, front-end, back-end, QA 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
• 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
• Provide vision and strategy for our stateless compute and edge platforms, balancing security, reliability, and developer experience at all times
• Design and build sweeping improvements to how we manage Kubernetes clusters at scale
• Ensure product engineering teams can securely and reliably deploy their applications with tooling, education, and hands-on assistance
• Partner closely with product engineering teams to provide subject matter expertise to ensure excellent outcomes on new feature releases and critical functionality
• Lead by example by supporting production infrastructure day-to-day, while committing to continuous improvement in site reliability infrastructure
• Within 1 month, you’ll plant your roots, including:
• Experiencing 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
• Making 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
• Learning about and make improvements to our Kubernetes deployment and monitoring tooling
• Starting to familiarize yourself with how we use Terraform, Chef, and Kubernetes to deploy infrastructure, configuration, and code changes
• Within 3 months, you’ll start hitting your stride by:
• Completing your first end-to-end project delivering improvements to our cluster management
• Gaining familiarity with our platform architecture
• Learning about our tooling supporting Sprout’s platform and web software development lifecycles (SDLCs)
• Using 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:
• Successfully migrating clusters through different hosting environments and software versions
• Partnering with product teams to help them monitor and improve the reliability of their applications
• Debugging reliability and scalability issues across our build, deployment, and integration environments using multiple application stacks and infrastructure technologies
• 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
• Identifying technical debt and performance bottlenecks within our systems, come up with a plan to improve the code, and get it pushed to production
• 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