Software Engineer - Backend

Summary

Join Sprout Social's Engineering team as a Software Engineer and contribute to building, scaling, and monitoring their platform reliably. You will embed in an engineering team, working on product-focused and infrastructural roles. The ideal candidate will have 3+ years of experience in software development and support, proficiency in object-oriented programming languages, and experience with backend services and databases. Sprout offers opportunities for skill diversification and career growth within a collaborative and supportive environment. The company provides a comprehensive benefits package, including insurance, paid time off, parental leave, wellness initiatives, and professional development opportunities. Remote work options are available in many US states.

Requirements

• 3+ years experience developing and supporting software in a production environment
• 3+ years experience programming in object oriented languages such as Java, C#, Python, or C++

Responsibilities

• Ensure we build, scale, ship, and monitor our platform reliably
• Embed in one of our engineering teams to work on both product focused and infrastructural roles
• 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
• 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
• 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
• 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

Preferred Qualifications

• 3+ years experience developing and supporting scalable, distributed backend services
• 3+ years experience working with databases
• Familiarity with AWS or other managed cloud services
• Experience with Docker and Kubernetes
• Experience with messaging systems
• Experience integrating with third-party APIs

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 and employee-led diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives
• 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. Sprout maintains a remote workforce in many places in the United States. However, we are not set up in all states, so please look at the drop-down box in our application to see whether your state is listed. Few roles require an office setting. If your position requires a physical presence in a Sprout office, it will be evident in the job listing and your offer letter
• Employees (and their dependents) are covered by medical, dental, vision, basic life, accidental death, and dismemberment insurance, and Modern Health (a wellness benefit)
• Employees are able to enroll in Sprout’s company’s 401k plan, in which Sprout will match 50% of your contributions up to 6% with a maximum contribution
• Sprout offers “Flexible Paid Time Off” and ten paid holidays