At Sprout Social we are building software that is made to last. Our 24,000+ customers rely on us daily to create stronger relationships with their customers and deliver actionable analytics, so scalability and performance are top of mind. Automation and infrastructure-as-code are essential ingredients that keep our platform flexible and empower us to react rapidly to changes in social media and the marketplace, while maintaining reliability and performance 24/7/365. Each day, our platform process 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 do not operate as lone wolves, cowboy coders, or “10x devs.” Instead, we are building diverse, collaborative teams that get the best results sustainably. Our Site Reliability Engineers work in tandem with Web, Platform, and QA Engineers to drive our product initiatives to successful outcomes.

We strive to build a culture where “paved roads” lead the way. Our Site Reliability Engineers are exposed to a wide breadth of technologies and technical challenges. We work to improve software development through automation, observability of metrics, and clear processes in order to build sustainable and fault tolerant solutions. Learning from systems failures and human mistakes is part of our culture.

If you are passionate about fighting toil while working toward automating anything and everything, we’d love to talk to you!

Within 1 month, you will:

• Complete Sprout’s New Hire training program
• Receive feedback on pull requests through active pairing with teammates
• Shadow a team member during their on-call rotation to prepare for yours
• Collaborate with your team members and fellow engineers to deliver value to our customers and numerous internal engineering teams
• Interact with our hosting platforms and perform operations tasks

Within 3 months, you will:

• Begin to familiarize yourself with our MySQL and Cassandra database clusters
• Become familiar with and perform many operational tasks
• Learn about how our teams use our streaming data pipeline built with NSQ
• Complete your first major project that may include writing a Chef cookbook, Terraform module, or upgrading and integrating pieces of Sprout’s infrastructure
• Focus on code quality with meaningful test coverage and legibility
• 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
• Lean on our monitoring tools such as Graphite, Grafana, and Nagios to troubleshoot production performance or stability issues
• Join our on-call rotation (don’t worry, you’ll shadow someone first and we’ve got your back!)

Within 6 months, you will:

• Form a career growth plan with your manager and begin working toward it
• Write design documents and gather feedback from your peers for new projects that you take on
• Accidentally break something, recover, and learn from it
• Interact with, maintain, and troubleshoot distributed, highly-available systems with our other engineering teams
• Build connections with members from other teams through collaboration and active networking
• Proactively identify, document, and schedule future work to be done with focus on eliminating operational toil

Within 12 months, you will:

• Be self-sufficient in at least one large area of our codebases and services with a high-level understanding of the rest
• Leave code in better shape than before
• Influence other developers and be a guide for following best practices
• Continue growing your knowledge of our environment and services
• Take ownership over small-to-medium projects from technical design through completion, and proactively communicate risks and challenges to your teammates
• Continually learn new systems and elevate everyone’s knowledge as you share what you’ve learned with the rest of the engineering team
• Build effective working relationships between our Chicago and Seattle engineering teams
• Retire end-of-life services or technologies and roll out new ones to continuously keep our systems up to date and follow engineering best practices
• Be encouraged 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 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

Sprout Social is an equal opportunity employer. Anyone seeking employment here is considered without regards to 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, Illinois, or local law. We value the things that make us different and want to see how you can make our team better!