Staff Site Reliability Engineer, Sprout Social

• We’re looking for a security-minded technologist with a strong infrastructure foundation and a bias for automation and simplification who thrives on ambiguity and can move fluidly between high-level strategy and deep technical execution
• If you’re interested in guiding engineers to shape the future of security at Sprout from the inside out, 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 and maintaining cloud security tools such as WAF, IAM, AWS Config, etc
• 3+ years 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

Desirable

• Create “Paved Roads”: standard production-ready technology that all of our engineering teams can leverage to build secure experiences
• 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 IAM modernization, zero trust, vulnerability remediation pipelines, and secure paved road delivery
• 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 key security infrastructure: Threatstack, WAF, IAM, OneLogin, etc
• Start familiarizing yourself with how we use Terraform, Jenkins, Chef, and Kubernetes to deploy infrastructure, configuration, and code changes
• Within 3 months, you’ll start hitting your stride by:
• Complete your first end to end project, such as a new infrastructure deployment using Chef and Terraform
• Gain familiarity with our platform architecture and DevSecOps 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 Security Tooling to improve our Security Posture
• Partner with product teams to deliver security solutions at scale that enable powerful features for our customers
• 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