At Sprout Social, we build software used by 20,000+ organizations to create stronger relationships with their customers and create the world’s most beloved brands. Our product teams 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.

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 comprised 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.

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 Sprout Social's overall product and technology roadmaps.

We’re looking for a collaborative, pragmatic, highly motivating engineering leader to help our teams succeed. 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!

Within 1 month, you will:

• Complete Sprout’s New Hire training program alongside other new Sprout team members.
• 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. Identify career growth opportunities and work with them on goals. 
• 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 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 Social
Sprout 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.

Team Sprout is a group of very talented, smart and passionate people with broad interests and backgrounds. We believe that true employee engagement cannot happen if you can’t bring your whole self to work, so we’re committed to building a diverse team, embracing an inclusive culture and investing in equity across our organization. That dedication is core to Sprout. We want all candidates, particularly those coming from traditionally underrepresented groups in the technology industry, to know they are welcome at Sprout.

We’re proud to regularly be recognized for software, product and company culture achievements. Our team’s shared belief in Sprout’s mission promotes a culture of openness, empowerment and fun. We have built a benefits program to match the strength of our team. This program includes:

• Insurance and benefit options that are built for both individuals and families, including generous company contributions
• Progressive benefit programs, like our parental leave program and free Divvy bike memberships
• High-quality and well-maintained equipment - your computer will never prevent you from doing your best
• Beautiful, convenient and state-of-the-art offices in Chicago’s Loop
• Solid programs in some of the staples: transportation, disability and life insurance
• Wellness initiatives to ensure both health and financial well-being of our team
• Breakfast and lunch options onsite, and more healthy snack options and beverages than you can imagine
• Growing corporate social responsibility program that is driven by the involvement and passion of our team members