Engineering Manager - Observability & Performance
At Sprout Social we are building software that is made to last. Our 20,000+ customers depend on us daily to connect them with their customers, so reliability, scalability, and performance are top of mind. Our software is used by companies like Evernote, Grubhub, Subaru and Edelman to create stronger relationships with their customers through social media. Each day, our platform processes 10’s of millions of social media messages and our APIs handle over 10 billion requests per year to deliver our software to customers in over 100 countries.
We’re looking for an engineering manager to lead our Observability and Performance team within Infrastructure Engineering. This multidisciplinary team’s mission is to:
- Provide a standard suite of reliable services, tools, and libraries for all aspects of logging, monitoring, and alerting for the rest of our engineering teams so they can leverage them while building and maintaining software they build for our customers
- Enable SRE best practices of implementing Service Level Objectives across the org
- Collaborate to help solve monitoring or performance issues when deeper expertise is required
A key part of your role on the team will be that of 'player-coach,' working alongside some of your direct reports while also carving out time to help direct and support their professional development. While you should be excited about writing and shipping production-level code and systems, we want you to be equally excited about the trajectory of your team and your part in forming them as stellar engineers.
The Experience:
- Have built or rolled out observability frameworks before
- Can understand our business and how to find our customer’s pain points with observability tools
- Experience writing, monitoring, and debugging web and/or distributed applications
- Proven track record for leading engineering projects
- Versed in Agile or Scrum, and used to helping keep a well-groomed backlog
- Empathy for the software developer UX of our observability toolset
- Understand the importance of and common metrics for implementing Service Level Indicators, Objectives, and Agreements
- Well-versed in technologies such as Grafana, Graphite, Statsd, ELK, InfluxDB, Sentry, Nagios, New Relic, or similar
- Familiarity with configuration and infrastructure as code tools like Chef and Terraform
- Have used container runtimes and orchestration frameworks like Kubernetes
We’re looking for a creative, collaborative, highly motivated, and inquisitive learner to build great software with us. If you’re passionate about observability and performance, are excited to guide other engineers with their careers, and want to be on a team that has a huge impact across all of engineering, 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.
- Become familiar with the observability tools utilized across our org, such as Graphite, Grafana, and Logstash, as well as in-house tooling we’ve built.
- Develop and deploy changes to production systems.
- Receive feedback on pull requests and actively pair with teammates.
- Shadow a team member for an on-call rotation.
- Review the team’s mission and goals for the year.
Within 3 months, you will:
- Collaborate with your team members and fellow developers to deliver value to our users.
- Engage regularly with the team and Infrastructure Director to prioritize upcoming project work to align with longer term goals.
- Gain familiarity with our platform architecture.
- Use our observability tools to help troubleshoot production performance or stability issues.
- Join our on-call rotation (don’t worry we’ve got your back!)
- Focus on code quality with meaningful test coverage.
- Contribute to our team’s culture of continuous improvement through retros and experimentation-oriented thinking.
Within 6 months, you will:
- Help the team implement common patterns and tools for implementing Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and gained traction in having other teams monitor and use SLOs.
- Regularly collaborate with the team to identify technical debt and come up with a plan to improve, and weave that work in with projects.
- Guide Engineering Leadership by surfacing key engineering team metrics on internal team dashboards.
- Meet with direct reports regularly and provide them with direct feedback on their work as well as formulating career growth plans.
- Participate in Engineering management discussions in order to learn from peer managers and to share lessons learned.
- Build relationships with product engineering teams to understand their observability pain points, and the value their software delivers for our customers.
- Build your engineering skills by attending in-house presentations, workshops, and training sessions.
- Form a career growth plan with your manager and work towards it.
Within 12 months, you will:
- Lead the team on several projects ensuring our suite of observability tools are reliable and easy to use across our engineering org.
- Complete career ladder and performance review evaluations for your direct reports.
- Actively mitigate risk of failed delivery and missed deadlines through courageous, transparent communication with colleagues and stakeholders throughout a project life cycle.
- Mentor 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 developers.
- Surprise us! Use your unique ideas and abilities to change your team 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
Sprout Social is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer and an Affirmative Action Employer. We do not discriminate based upon race, religion, color, national origin, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, genetic information, marital status, order of protection status, citizenship status, or other applicable legally protected characteristics. We also consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state and local law. 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. Requests for accommodation will be considered on a case-by-case basis. 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.
Additionally, Sprout Social participates in the E-Verify program in certain locations, as required by law. We value the things that make us different and want to see how you can make our team better!
