Staff Software Engineer - Back-End

Description

Sprout Social is looking to hire a Staff Software Engineer to join our 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

• Lead the team through complicated product and technical roadmaps and guide them to successful outcomes.
• Work to improve the processes, systems, and tools we use to deliver quality products, champion ideas that matter, and hold the team accountable.

What you’ll bring

We’re looking for a creative, collaborative, pragmatic, highly motivated, and inquisitive technical leader to join our team in building great software. If you can solve hard problems, deliver quality server side software, and confidently guide your peers to learn from and teach each other, we’d love to talk with you!

The minimum qualifications for this role include:

• 7+ years experience developing and supporting software in a production environment
• 5+ years experience Distributed Systems development experience

Preferred qualifications for this role include:

• 5+ years experience developing and supporting scalable, distributed backend services
• 4+ years of working with databases

How you’ll grow

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

• Complete Sprout’s New Hire training program alongside other new Sprout team members.
• Get acclimated to the team's current Mission, Goals, and Objectives along with future product roadmaps.
• Deploy and make changes to our production systems.
• Interact with SQL or NoSQL data stores and NSQ messaging queues.
• Collaborate regularly with product managers, QA engineers, and other product teams to deliver value to our users.
• Get regular team feedback on your work through code reviews and pairing.
• Log into our remote Linux servers and monitor the status of our services. 

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

• Decompose work into small, similarly sized units so that estimation is unnecessary.
• Work with your squad to create and prioritize quarterly team goals.
• Contribute to our Agile culture of continuous improvement through retrospective meetings and experimentation-oriented thinking.
• Build connections with members from other teams through guild meetings and chapter outings.
• Participate in technical design meetings with your teammates to walk through new feature ideas. 
• Work with product managers, UX developers, and front-end engineers to come up with the MVPs of new features.
• Be the first line of defense against product outages and bugs while on support duty.
• Maintain, scale, and build upon systems that handle hundreds of thousands of messages a day. 
• Write design documents, coordinate dependencies, and act as the domain owner for new projects.

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

• Integrate and use monitoring and alerting tools to know about problems before our users.
• Create and manage concurrent, distributed systems.
• Build your engineering skills by attending in-house presentations, workshops, and training sessions.
• Lead technical design meetings with your teammates to walk through new feature ideas. 
• Identify technical debt and performance bottlenecks within our systems, come up with a plan to improve the code, and get it pushed to production.
• Work and communicate effectively with other groups across the organization to ensure big-picture alignment and encourage cross-team collaboration.
• Form a career growth plan with your manager and work towards it.
• Partner with the Infrastructure team to improve your team’s ability to deliver reliable, highly available services.

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

• Be the go-to expert of your teams’ systems at the company.
• Own cross-organizational projects, demonstrating project management skills, consensus building, and strong leadership.
• 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 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.