At Sprout Social, we build software used by 30,000+ organizations to create stronger relationships with their customers and create the world's most beloved brands. Our software is used by companies like the DoorDash, General Mills, Trello, Make-a-wish Foundation, Edelman, and Blue Cross Blue Shield. We build powerful tools that enable brands to effectively collaborate and engage with their customers across their social networks. Our work has to adapt as brands are innovating on workflows for content creation, real time customer service, marketing campaigns, and data driven decisions. To power this means building reliable, scalable, resilient distributed systems that also must be nimble enough to respond to keep up with new capabilities being offered by social network APIs.
As an Engineering Director, you will partner with product and design directors to develop and execute a strategy for the team. Our autonomous engineering teams are organized by product lines, and grouped by product suite. Each autonomous team is composed of web, platform, QA, and mobile engineers, alongside a product manager and product designer. You'll lead the teams through complicated product and technical road maps, and guide them to successful outcomes. Our team uses a variety of technologies, including Java, Python, MySQL, Cassandra, Hadoop, Elasticsearch, EMR, Docker, and Kubernetes.
Relying on your experience in building and maintaining highly scalable and reliable software systems, as well as building engineering teams, you'll guide the teams to iteratively deliver quality software. You'll need to understand their approach and help them prioritize and focus. You will work alongside product and design directors on upcoming roadmaps for the team, and coordinate with our other product teams to align our overall product and technology roadmaps.
We're looking for a collaborative, pragmatic, highly motivating engineering leader to help our teams succeed and mentor on how big data should be stored and processed more efficiently and quickly at scale. If you can confidently lead teams to solve hard problems, and push them to learn from and teach each other, we'd love to talk with you!
Qualifications
These are the minimum qualifications that our hiring team is looking for in this role:

• 7+ years of experience developing and supporting software in a production environment
• 5+ years of experience managing and leading engineering teams
• 2+ years of experience leading/guiding teams with big data architecture and data modeling for efficient processing of large volumes of data at scale

Additionally, these are the preferred qualifications that would indicate a particularly strong candidate:

• Experience with big data open source technologies and software development skills
• Experience with architecture, design and production operation of large scale data and analytics solutions leveraging technologies such as Hadoop, EMR, Spark, Elasticsearch, NoSQL databases (Cassandra) etc.
• Experience developing enterprise level distributed applications using Python, Java, distributed queuing systems etc

Within 1 month, you will:

• 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
• Get acclimated to the team's current and future product roadmaps.
• Begin to understand the capabilities and limitations of our platform, web, and mobile technologies.
• Start to build relationships with the product and design directors.
• Start to learn the capabilities and limitations of the social network APIs we use
• Deploy code to production in order to understand the engineering environment, build tools, and deployment mechanisms.
• Learn Sprout's management practices and tools.

Within 3 months, you will:

• Begin to hone the team's vision alongside the product and design directors
• Participate in architectural discussions and decisions, asking the right questions to push your team to successful outcomes.
• Analyze trends with bugs and help the team identify where to best focus.
• Help the teams shape the technical roadmap for long term success.
• Assume management of your team's people managers and staff+ software engineers. Meet with them regularly and provide them with direct, constructive feedback on their work, as well as formulating career growth plans.
• Start 1:1s with everyone on the team and continue building relationships.
• Help the team improve processes and team rituals.
• Build relationships with our infrastructure, data science and support teams and identify ways your teams can be more proactive and effective.

Within 6 months, you will:

• Guide your teams through the successful launch of a major feature.
• Understand the business goals and help the team balance technical debt, bugs, and product features.
• Start to grow your leaders and ensure they are focused on the right things.
• Get acclimated to the hiring process and assume the staffing plan and process for the team.
• Lead the performance review and career band calibration process for your team.
• Convey the strategy and vision to your team, engineering leadership, and the broader engineering team.
• Proactively focus your team on the right problems.

Within 12 months, you will:

• Have development plans in place for your leaders and hold them accountable.
• Start to automate some of the mechanics of the processes you helped build.
• Help to hone the engineering processes across all engineering teams.
• Surprise us! Use your unique ideas and abilities to change Sprout Engineering 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.
About Sprout SocialSprout Social powers open communication between individuals, brands and communities through elegant, sophisticated software. We are relentless about solving hard problems for our customers and committed to both customer and team success. Our team's shared belief in Sprout's mission promotes a culture of openness, empowerment and fun.
We're proud to regularly be recognized for our team, product and culture. Our benefits program includes:

• 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

Whenever possible, Sprout wants to provide our team with the flexibility to work in the location that makes the most sense for them. For those that prefer an office setting, this role may be based in our Chicago or Seattle locations. If you prefer to work from your home, we can accommodate that for many locations across the United States. We are not set up in all states, however, so please take a look at the drop down box in our application to see whether your state is listed.
Sprout Social is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer and an Affirmative Action Employer. We do not discriminate based on identity- race, color, religion, national origin or ancestry, sex (including sexual identity), age, physical or mental disability, pregnancy, veteran or military status, unfavorable discharge from military service, genetic information, sexual orientation, marital status, order of protection status, citizenship status, arrest record or expunged or sealed convictions, or any other legally recognized protected basis under federal, state, or local law. Learn more about our commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion in our 2021 DEI Report .
If you need a reasonable accommodation for any part of the employment process, please contact us by email at [email protected] and let us know the nature of your request and your contact information. We'll do all we can to ensure you're set up for success during our interview process while upholding your privacy, including requests for accommodation. Please note that only inquiries concerning a request for reasonable accommodation will be responded to from this email address.
For more information about our commitment to equal employment opportunity, please click here (1) Equal Opportunity Employment Poster (2) Sprout Social's Affirmative Action Statement (3) Pay Transparency Statement .
When you apply for employment with Sprout Social, we will process your job applicant data, including your employment and education history, transcript, writing samples, and references as necessary to consider your job application for open positions. For more information about our privacy practices please visit our Privacy Policy. California residents have additional rights and should review the Additional Disclosures for California Residents section in our Privacy Policy.
Additionally, Sprout Social participates in the E-Verify program in certain locations, as required by law.
#LI-Remote