Staff Back End Software Engineer, Sprout Social

• We know experience is built in a number of ways. Even if your background doesn’t match the exact requirements, we encourage you to apply and share any relevant skills in a cover letter
• We are looking for a Staff Engineer who leads through craft
• Your primary motivation is delivering customer outcomes by solving hard technical problems with simple solutions, and you're not afraid to be hands-on to get it done
• You're a pragmatic leader who mentors others through your code and design, and you're driven to build high-quality, high-scale platforms that make every engineer around you better
• If you thrive on technical ownership and want to build the systems that secure a platform at our scale, we want to talk to you!
• 10+ 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++
• 3+ years experience leading engineering projects and initiatives, including the design, development, and implementation of distributed systems, ensuring delivery of reliable services, prioritizing technical improvements with cross-functional teams, and/or driving technical vision

Desirable

• Our Identity and Access Management (IAM) engineering teams design and build elegant platform capabilities that power multi-tenant experiences across our entire product suite
• IAM is central to Sprout’s technical strategy
• It enables major R&D investments, including our integration ecosystem and AI agent actions via Sprout’s MCP servers
• Beyond these strategic unlocks, IAM ensures Sprout’s customers can manage user access in fast-moving environments that evolve at the pace of social
• Our work amplifies the impact of every Engineering team, and we’re looking for leaders who can elevate others while diving deep into complex technical challenges to deliver solutions that are simple, intuitive, and built to scale
• Own the technical execution of our IAM vision. You will be the lead designer and builder for new, scalable access control solutions that will be used by all of Sprout's Product teams
• Architect and build our next-generation, multi-tenant authorization control plane, designed to manage access across a variety of products, types of principals, and jobs-to-be-done
• Scale our authorization data plane to scale to billions of requests daily while remaining intuitive and approachable to engineers across the organization
• Be the engineer accountable for service-level outcomes. You will write the code and set the standards that ensure our core access services are highly available, low-latency, and secure
• Design and ship the platform-level IAM patterns, libraries, and tools that will multiply the effectiveness of our entire R&D organization
• 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 Objectives and Key Results, along with future product roadmap priorities
• Learn about our current multi-product Identity and Access Management technical vision
• Deploy and make changes to our production systems
• Become familiar with the team’s current Service Level Objectives (SLOs) that ensure a world-class customer experience
• Collaborate regularly with product managers, product designers, engineers, and other product teams to deliver value to our customers
• Embrace regular team feedback on your work through code reviews and pairing
• Within 3 months, you will:
• Begin operating as the access domain’s technical owner by leading initiatives, coordinating with stakeholders, and assuming responsibility for our quality of service
• Work with product managers, UX developers, back-end and front-end engineers to lead your first feature delivery, with deliverables broken into milestones centered on customer outcomes
• Proactively build relationships with members on other teams through active networking and community building
• Become an active participant in code reviews, retrospectives, and team demos, continuously providing guidance and feedback to others
• Foster a positive culture on your teams as an intrinsic side effect of the way you communicate and collaborate
• Be the first line of defense against product outages and bugs while on support duty
• Author your career growth plan with your manager’s support and work towards it
• Within 6 months, you will:
• Design, create, and maintain access platform solutions that execute at internet scale in a cost effective manner
• Boost the access team’s impact by identifying and delivering improvements to our libraries, tools, and approach to code generation
• Apply your expertise to enhance our existing use of monitoring and alerting tools, thereby ensuring we know about problems before our customers or other product teams reliant on our platform
• Own and evolve our access technical strategy, partnering closely with peers to shape and refine the broader IAM vision for the organization
• Mentor engineers, helping them level up technically
• Within 12 months, you will:
• Be the go-to expert of our access solutions at the company
• Utilize the cross-organization connections you’ve built to identify IAM areas of need across our platform, and create plans that incorporate big-picture technical alignment with other leaders
• Own cross-organizational IAM projects and architecture, 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
• 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