Senior Site Reliability Engineer - Database Reliability

Description

Sprout Social is looking to hire a Senior Site Reliability Engineer to the Engineering team.

Why join Sprout’s Engineering team?

With collaborative cross-functional teams that span mobile, front-end, back-end, QA and site reliability engineering—the Sprout Engineering team is a place to sharpen your craft and solve hard problems with the smartest people in the industry. You’ll get to work on a “tech-giant” scale with smaller, supportive teams where every engineer has the chance to make an impact on our company, and our customers. The best part? In our industry, you often have to switch jobs or even companies to learn a new part of a tech stack or business. But at Sprout, our product is a suite, so you just need to move teams. You’re able to diversify your skills, which not only benefits your team—but also your career. 

What you’ll do

• Create “Paved Roads”: standard production-ready technology that all of our engineering teams can leverage to deliver value quickly.
• Work to improve all aspects of engineering through automation, observability of metrics, and clear processes in order to build sustainable and fault-tolerant solutions.
• Deliver a reliable, scalable, secure, and cost-effective data layer to power all our products with technologies like MySQL, ElasticSsearch and HBase
• Partner closely with product engineering teams to provide subject matter expertise to ensure excellent outcomes on novel product features

What you’ll bring

We are looking for a creative, collaborative, highly motivated, and pragmatic engineer to help us design and build reliable, scalable, performant systems that empower engineers to rapidly and safely deliver value to our customers. If this sounds like you and you want to be on a team that has a huge impact across all of engineering, we’d love to talk with you!

The minimum qualifications for this role include:

• 4+ years building and maintaining reliable, scalable systems in a Linux/UNIX environment
• 4+ years experience with one or more infrastructure-as-code or configuration-as-code tools, such as: Terraform, Chef, Ansible, SaltStack, etc.
• 3+ years experience operating and maintaining RDBMSs like MySQL, Postgres, etc.

Preferred qualifications for this role include:

• 2+ years with one or more Cloud providers; AWS, GCP, or similar
• 3+ years experience with one or more of ElasticSearch, HBase, or Elastic MapReduce (EMR)
• Experience in at least one programming language, such as Python, Java, Golang, or Ruby

How you’ll grow

Within 1 month, you’ll plant your roots, including:

• 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 site reliability engineering
• Learn about and interact with some of our key storage technologies: MySQL, ElasticSearch, Cassandra, and Hadoop
• Start familiarizing yourself with how we use Terraform, Chef, and Kubernetes to deploy infrastructure, configuration, and code changes.

Within 3 months, you’ll start hitting your stride by:

• Complete your first end to end project, such as a new infrastructure deployment using Chef and Terraform
• Gain familiarity with our platform architecture
• Learn about our use of NSQ in our streaming data ingest pipeline
• Use our observability tools to troubleshoot production performance or stability issues
• Join our on-call rotation (don’t worry we’ve got your back!)
• 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
• Proactively identify, advocate for, and make high impact improvements to reduce operational toil

Within 6 months, you’ll be making a clear impact through:

• Successfully migrating critical legacy datastores to managed database technologies to reduce operational load and increase reliability.
• Partnering with product teams to deliver database solutions at scale that enable powerful features for our customers.
• Debugging reliability and scalability issues across multiple layers of the stack and multiple database technologies.
• Help complete a impactful project that is well-baked and bug-free
• Write design documents, gather feedback from peers, coordinate dependencies, and be a domain owner for a new project
• Form a career growth plan with your manager and begin work towards it

Within 12 months, you’ll make this role your own by:

• Actively mitigate risk of failed delivery and missed deadlines through courageous, transparent communication with colleagues and stakeholders throughout a project life cycle.
• Lead technical architecture meetings. 
• Identify technical debt and performance bottlenecks within our systems, come up with a plan to improve the code, and get it pushed to production.
• 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 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.

Our Benefits Program

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

Candidates for this remote work opportunity must be based in either British Columbia or Ontario. If you are based in another location within Canada, we aren’t able to hire in your location at this time; however, if you’d like to stay in touch with us in case that changes in the future, please apply and we’ll save your application for possible future consideration.

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