At Sprout Social, we are building software that is made to last. Our customers depend on us daily to reliably connect them with their clients and deliver actionable analytics. Scalability and performance are top of mind. Infrastructure as code and automation are essential ingredients to keeping our platform flexible and rapidly reacting to changes in the market and social media networks.

Our software platforms run on top of some 850+ instances. Each day we ingest and process terabytes of data from social media networks for our 24,000+ customers who rely on our products to create stronger relationships with their customers through social media.

We do not operate as lone wolves, cowboy coders, or “10x devs.” Instead, we’re building diverse, collaborative teams that get the best results sustainably. 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 a pull request(s) through active pairing with teammates
• Shadow a team member for your first on-call session
• Collaborate with your team members and fellow developers to deliver value to our users
• Interact with hosting platforms and perform operations tasks
• Become familiar with the numerous monitoring tools utilized by our team such as Kibana, Graphite, Grafana, and Nagios

Within 3 months, you will:

• Begin to familiarize yourself with our noSQL and relational database services; interact and perform operational task(s)
• Learn about our use of Apache Kafka and Storm in our streaming data platform
• Complete your first major project, such as a Chef cookbook, monitoring, or new infrastructure deployment
• 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 Ganglia, Grafana, and Kibana to troubleshoot production performance or stability issues
• Proactively identify, document, and schedule future work to be done, working toward eliminating operational toil

Within 6 months, you will

• Retire a service(s) that is EOL and clean up artifacts
• Write design documents, gather feedback from peers, coordinate dependencies, and be a domain owner for a new project(s)
• Form a career growth plan with your manager and begin work towards it
• Accidentally break something, recover, and learn from it
• Interact with and maintain concurrent, distributed systems
• Build connections with members from other teams through active networking and community building

Within 12 months, you will

• Be a go-to expert of at least one key system at the company
• Influence other developers and be a guide for following best practices
• Continue growing your knowledge of our environment and services
• Actively mitigate risk of failed delivery and missed deadlines through courageous, transparent communication with colleagues and stakeholders throughout a project life cycle
• Continually evaluate and refine your technical toolkit: teach what you learn to the team
• Build effective working relationships between our Chicago and Seattle engineering teams
• Have opportunities to contribute to in-house technical presentations and workshops that share your expertise with large groups of Sprout developers
• Have opportunities to advocate for Sprout Engineering in the software community by participating/speaking at conferences, user groups, etc.
• 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
• 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 downtown Seattle 
• 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
• Growing corporate social responsibility program that is driven by the involvement and passion of our team members

Sprout Social proud to be an Equal Employment Opportunity and Affirmative Action employer. We do not discriminate based upon race, religion, color, national origin, sex (including pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions), sexual orientation, gender identity, gender expression, age, status as a protected veteran, status as an individual with a disability, genetic information, or other applicable legally protected characteristics. We also consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state and local law. Additionally, Sprout Social participates in the E-Verify program in certain locations, as required by law. We value the things that make us different and want to see how you can make our team better!