Staff Back End Software Engineer, Sprout Social
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All-in-one social media management platform
Be an early applicant
All-in-one social media management platform
1001+ employees
Be an early applicant
More information about location
1001+ employees
Company mission
To help organizations of all sizes become better marketers and create the world’s most beloved brands.
Role
Who you are
- We’re looking for a deeply technical, creative, collaborative, pragmatic, highly motivated, and inquisitive leader to join our team in delivering software that delights our customers
- If you love solving hard problems, delivering high quality, scalable software services, and confidently guide your peers to learn from and teach each other, we’d love to talk to you!
- 7+ years experience developing and supporting software in a production environment
- 5+ years experience programming in an object oriented language such as Java, Python, C# or C++
Desirable
- 5+ years experience developing and supporting high throughput, scalable, distributed backend services
- 4+ years of working with large databases or data stores
- Experience working with and tuning Elasticsearch, or OpenSearch in a large distributed setup
- Experience working with cloud computing technologies such as AWS or GCP
What the job involves
- Our Customer Experience Engineering team builds tools to help our customers automate tasks to accelerate response times so they can connect with their customers quickly and efficiently, including the Smart Inbox, Case Management capabilities, Customer Experiences, and Integrations external to Sprout
- This part of the business is growing very quickly, and you’ll leverage your understanding of both the technical and people implications of a fast growing business to navigate and lead us through this rapid growth and change
- You will collaborate with the stakeholders to define the vision and help lead the team through complex product and technical roadmaps, guiding 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 systems
- Interact with SQL and NoSQL data stores and NSQ messaging queues
- 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 trivial
- Work with your stakeholders and 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, back-end and front-end engineers and your leadership team to come up with the MVPs of new features
- Be the first line of defense against product outages and defects while on support duty
- Maintain, scale, and build systems that execute at internet scale
- Write Engineering briefs, design documents, coordinate dependencies, and act as the domain owner for your product zone and also the adjacencies
- Within 6 months, you will:
- Learn to use monitoring and alerting tools to know about problems before our users
- Plan, create and manage large concurrent, distributed systems in a cost effective manner
- Build and demonstrate your engineering skills by attending as well as delivering in-house presentations, workshops, and training sessions
- Lead technical design meetings to walk through new feature ideas
- Identify technical debt and performance bottlenecks within our systems, come up with a plan to improve them, and release them to production
- Work and communicate effectively with other groups across the organization to ensure big-picture alignment and encourage cross-team collaboration
- Create a career growth plan with your manager, and work towards it
- Partner with the Infrastructure team to improve your team’s ability to deliver scalable, reliable and 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
Our take
Engagement tools for social media are proving increasingly vital with the rise of social commerce, and brands need to keep a careful eye on customer satisfaction and interaction if the company is to net a profit from this market. Sprout Social is a social media management platform for brands and agencies of all sizes, allowing users to post, manage engagement, and access analytics on a single hub.
With plenty of big-name customers, including Unicef, Chipotle, and Subaru, Sprout Social has developed a trusted and effective brand of its own. It dodged direct competition with social engagement platform Hootsuite by expressly prioritizing its customer service tools, where Sprout Social appears to be generally recognized as superior.
To double down on serving the social commerce market, and carve out a distinctive niche ahead of this eCommerce trend’s anticipated success, Sprout Social has integrated with platforms such as Shopify and Facebook Shops. It is also a member of the TikTok marketing partner program, and has continued to receive accolades for its software.
Steph
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
21% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 5 rounds)
Dec 2018
$40.5m
SERIES D
Feb 2016
$42m
SERIES C
Total funding: $101.5m
Company benefits
- 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, employee-led diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives and mentorship programs for aspiring leaders
- 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
Company values
- Care Deeply
- Embrace Accountability
- Champion Diversity, Equity & Inclusion
- Promote Open, Authentic Communication
- Seek Simplicity
- Solve Hard Problems
- Celebrate Change
Company HQ
Chicago Loop, Chicago, IL
Articles
Leadership
Justyn Howard
(CEO)They were Senior Account Executive at New Horizons, and worked in Learn.com's Executive Account Sales department.
Aaron Rankin
(CTO)They have a Master's in Information Systems Management from Carnegie Mellon and were an IT Architect at IBM. They were also a Software Engineer at Endeca, and they are currently an investor with Rankin Family Ventures.
Peter Soung
(Head of Growth)They studied Computer Science at Penn State before working at IBM as a Software Engineer. They also worked as a Sales Engineer at companies such as Endeca.
Diversity, Equity & Inclusion at Sprout Social
Cassandra Blackburn (Director, Diversity, Equity and Inclusion)
- At Sprout Social, we’re committed to building a diverse team, fostering an inclusive culture and investing in equity across our organization. By prioritizing equity, defined as system-level change, we ensure that our practices support a diverse and inclusive environment.
- Monthly DEI Guild meetings: DEI Guild meetings provide a space for our team to learn about different cultures, identities and societal challenges that underrepresented groups face. Recent meetings have explored the US criminal justice system, understanding intersectionality and unsung heroes of Black America
- Resource groups: Members of our resource groups are people who share a common purpose, interest or background. Resource groups provide the space for team members to connect, exercise leadership skills and contribute to our ongoing DEI initiatives
- Training & development: To ensure our hiring and management practices are equitable, all new hires receive an introduction to DEI and unconscious bias training in their first month at Sprout. Our learning and development program, Grow@Sprout, contains courses for continued DEI learning and small groups meet monthly to extend discussions from previous DEI Guild meetings
- Community engagement: Team Sprout engages in the community in a number of ways, including partnering with organizations that serve the priority identity groups of our DEI initiatives and leading internal initiatives like our annual Philanthropy Week, Technology Giving Program and our volunteering program, Sprout Serves
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