Who you are

• We’re looking for a creative, collaborative, highly motivated, and inquisitive learner to help us deliver a great product to our customers
• You’re passionate about building and scaling reliable systems
• 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++
• 3+ years experience developing and supporting scalable, distributed backend services
• 3+ years experience working with SQL and/or NoSQL databases

What the job involves

• Sprout Social is looking to hire a Senior Software Engineer to join our Engineering team
• You'll ensure we build, scale, ship, and monitor our platform reliably, leveraging technologies such as Java, Python, MySQL, NSQ, Hbase, AWS, and Kubernetes
• Partner with product managers, designers, and other engineers to define requirements and complete feature work
• Work to improve the processes, systems, and tools we use to deliver quality products and champion technical initiatives and direction
• Uphold project quality and planning through meeting deadlines, breaking down work, and ensuring proper testing and monitoring
• Lift the skills of other engineers through mentorship, knowledge sharing, and providing feedback on PRs and technical designs
• Within 1 month, you’ll plant your roots, including:
• Complete Sprout Social’s new hire training & onboarding program alongside other new Sprout team members. You’ll gain a broader understanding of our products and how your role fits into the organization
• Deploy and make changes to our production systems
• Interact with SQL or NoSQL data stores and messaging queues
• Collaborate regularly with product managers and other product teams to deliver value to our users
• Get regular team feedback on your work through code reviews and pairing
• Proactively monitor the health of our services in production to ensure our customers always have a world-class experience
• Within 3 months, you’ll start hitting your stride by:
• Work with your team 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 and system improvements
• 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
• Within 6 months, you’ll be making clear impact through:
• Create, deploy, and manage concurrent, distributed systems
• 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
• Decompose work into small, similarly sized units so that estimation is unnecessary
• Identify technical debt and performance bottlenecks within our systems, come up with a plan to improve the code, and get it pushed to production
• Within 12 months, you’ll make this role your own by:
• Integrate and use monitoring and alerting tools to know about problems before our users
• Participate in architecture discussions with senior team members
• Be “point person” on a project, including writing design documents, coordinating dependencies, and acting as domain owner
• Actively mitigate risk of failed delivery and missed deadlines through courageous, transparent communication with colleagues and stakeholders throughout a project life cycle
• Demonstrate ownership over the codebase, from design to maintenance and everything in between

Benefits

• 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