At Sprout Social we are building software that is made to last. Our 25,000+ customers rely on us daily to reliably connect them with their customers, so scalability and performance are top of mind. Sprout Social is used by companies like the Chicago Bulls, Sony Electronics, Indiana University, Make-a-Wish Foundation, Edelman and Subaru who rely on Sprout to create stronger relationships with their customers through social media.

Our team bridges the gap between our dozens of Product Engineering teams and the infrastructure that supports their applications by building tools, libraries, processes, and systems that unlock developer productivity. This ranges from CI/CD tooling to deployment tooling to streamlining test environments, containerization, common libraries, observability, and more. What matters is caring deeply about our Developer Experience, partnering with our Product Engineering and Infrastructure teams, finding common patterns amongst their pain points, and building scalable solutions.

We do not operate as lone wolves or “10x devs.” Instead, we’re building diverse, collaborative teams that get the best results sustainably. Our developer tooling engineers work in tandem with Product engineers, SREs, and management to drive our initiatives to successful outcomes. As a senior engineer, you will join the team in building sophisticated tooling to make our engineers happy and productive, and work to improve the processes, systems, and tools we use to deliver quality products, champion ideas that matter, and hold the team accountable.

We’re looking for a creative, collaborative, pragmatic, highly motivated, and inquisitive technical contributor to join our team in building great software. If you can solve hard problems and work alongside your peers to deliver quality server-side software, we’d love to talk with you!

Qualifications

These are the minimum qualifications that our hiring team is looking for in this role:

• 4+ years experience developing and supporting software in a production environment
• 3+ years experience programming in object oriented languages such as Java, Python, or C++
• 2+ years building and maintaining reliable, scalable systems in a Linux/UNIX environment

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

• Experience building internal tools or building tools with developers as its core customer base
• At least one year experience with one or more infrastructure-as-code or configuration-as-code tools, such as: Terraform, Chef, Ansible, SaltStack, 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
• 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 infrastructure and tooling
• Develop and deploy changes to our systems.
• Collaborate with your team members and fellow developers to deliver value to our engineers
• Receive feedback on pull request(s) and actively pair with teammates
• Ramp up on our core Infrastructure technology stack including Datadog, Jenkins, Chef, Terraform and Kubernetes

Within 3 months, you will:

• Gain familiarity with our platform architecture, tools, and developer workflows so you can understand pain points to improving developer velocity and experience
• Complete your first end-to-end stories, such as a new deployment pipeline for an emerging piece of our infrastructure
• Contribute to our Agile culture of continuous improvement through retrospective meetings and experimentation-oriented thinking.
• Implement improvements to our observability stack
• Use our observability tools to troubleshoot production performance or stability issues
• Focus on code quality with meaningful test coverage
• Participate in code reviews and give feedback to team members
• Contribute to our team’s culture of continuous improvement through retros and experimentation-oriented thinking

Within 6 months, you will:

• Write design documents, coordinate dependencies, and act as the domain owner for new projects.
• Work and communicate effectively with other groups across the organization during projects to ensure successful project participation and completion.
• Participate in technical design meetings with your teammates to orient yourself to new projects and feature work.
• Identify technical debt and performance bottlenecks within our systems, come up with a plan to improve the code, and get it pushed to production.
• Help complete an impactful project that is well-baked and bug-free
• Have your first performance conversation with your manager, where you’ll discuss your accomplishments in your role and work together to build goals for your professional growth

Within 12 months, you will:

• Influence other developers and model engineering best practices
• Become a specialist for your team’s systems at the company.
• Work on cross-organizational projects, demonstrating a high degree of collaboration and empathy.
• Actively mitigate risk of failed delivery and missed deadlines through courageous, transparent communication with colleagues and stakeholders throughout a project life cycle.
• Mentor junior 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 engineers.
• 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. 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 2020 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.