Staff Software Engineer, Sprout Social

• 7+ years experience developing and supporting software in a production environment
• 5+ years experience Distributed Systems development experience
• We’re looking for a creative, collaborative, pragmatic, highly motivated, and inquisitive technical leader
• If you can solve hard problems, deliver quality server side software, and confidently guide your peers to learn from and teach each other, we’d love to talk with you!

Desirable

• 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
• You will help lead the team through complicated product and technical roadmaps and guide them to successful outcomes
• You will work to improve the processes, systems, and tools we use to deliver quality products, champion ideas that matter, and hold the team accountable
• Within 1 month, you’ll plant your roots, including::
• Complete Sprout’s New Hire training program alongside other new Sprout team members
• Get acclimated to the team's current Mission, Goals, and Objectives along with future product roadmaps
• Deploy and make changes to our production system running on Java APIs, EMR (Spark, HBase) and ElasticSearch
• Collaborate regularly with product managers, QA engineers, 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 will:
• Decompose work into small, similarly sized units so that estimation is unnecessary
• Work with your squad 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
• 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
• Write design documents, coordinate dependencies, and act as the domain owner for new projects
• Within 6 months, you will:
• Integrate and use monitoring and alerting tools to know about problems before our users
• Create and manage concurrent, distributed systems
• Build your engineering skills by attending in-house presentations, workshops, and training sessions
• Lead technical design meetings with your teammates to walk through new feature ideas
• Identify technical debt and performance bottlenecks within our systems, come up with a plan to improve the code, and get it pushed to production
• Work and communicate effectively with other groups across the organization to ensure big-picture alignment and encourage cross-team collaboration
• Form a career growth plan with your manager and work towards it
• Partner with the Infrastructure team to improve your team’s ability to deliver reliable, highly available services
• Within 12 months, you will:
• Be the go-to expert of your teams’ systems at the company
• Own cross-organizational projects, demonstrating project management skills, consensus building, and strong leadership
• Actively mitigate risk of failed delivery and missed deadlines through courageous, transparent communication with colleagues and stakeholders throughout a project life cycle
• Lead technical architecture meetings
• Identify technical debt and performance bottlenecks within our systems, come up with a plan to improve the code, and get it pushed to production
• Mentor junior engineers, helping them level up technically
• Build connections with members from other teams through active networking and community building
• Have 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 your team 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