Senior Software Engineer - Backend (Tooling)

Description

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

Why join Sprout’s Engineering team?

With collaborative cross-functional teams that span mobile, front-end, back-end 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. On a daily basis, we process tens of billions of requests and tens of billions of asynchronous events. We also ingest billions of social messages every day, and ship more than 1,000 production deployments every month. 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 build our customer-facing products.
• Work to improve Sprout’s security posture through automation, auditability, and clear processes in order to build sustainable and secure solutions.
• Enforce security best practices through code to minimize chances of misconfiguration and increase confidence in service adoption in the cloud.
• Collaborate cross-functionally with product, site reliability engineering, data platform, and GRC teams to deliver scalable, secure-by-default infrastructure
• Act as a multiplier: leading with influence across teams and orgs, creating momentum for cross-functional initiatives, and driving alignment on security best practices.
• Lead by example—pairing deep technical expertise with pragmatic execution and mentorship.
• Own strategic initiatives such as pre-prod testing environments, more mature observability, advanced deployment methods, and service standardization.

What you’ll bring

We’re looking for a deeply technical, creative, collaborative, pragmatic, highly motivated, and inquisitive engineer who biases for simplicity to join our team in building great tools. If you love solving hard problems, delivering and sustaining high-quality software, and confidently guiding your peers to learn from and teach each other, we’d love to talk with you!

The minimum qualifications for this role include:

• 4+ years experience developing and supporting software in a production environment
• 3+ years experience programming in an object oriented language such as Java, Python, C# or C++
• 2+ years experience working with CI/CD Pipelines using tools such as Jenkins, Gitlab, Github Actions, etc.
• Experience leading engineering projects and initiatives, including the design, development, and implementation of infrastructure systems, ensuring delivery of reliable services, prioritizing technical improvements with cross-functional teams, and/or driving technical vision.

Preferred qualifications for this role include:

• 2+ years experience with Amazon Web Services (AWS)
• Experience with one or more infrastructure-as-code or configuration-as-code tools, such as: Terraform, Chef, Ansible, SaltStack, etc.
• Experience with software delivery platforms such as Argo, Spinnaker, or Flux
• Experience with observability tools like Datadog, Sentry, or Honeycomb

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 core tools: Jenkins, GitHub Actions, Datadog, our in-house deploy tools, etc
• Start familiarizing yourself with how we support the SDLC and development workflows across Sprout’s engineering teams

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

• Complete your first end-to-end project, such as a new GitHub Actions workflows or Datadog features
• Gain familiarity with our platform architecture and SDLC practices
• Use our observability tools to troubleshoot production performance or stability issues
• Joining our on-call rotation (don’t worry we’ve got your back!)
• Participating in code reviews and giving feedback to team members
• Contributing to our team’s culture of continuous improvement through retros and experimentation-oriented thinking
• Writing design documents for new tooling and processes, gathering feedback from peers, coordinating dependencies, and being a domain owner for a new project
• Proactively identifying, advocating for, and making high impact improvements to reduce operational toil

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

• Implement new deploy tooling to help our engineers ship code faster and more safely
• Partner with product teams to deliver enable them to build, test, deploy, and observe their features to deliver a high-quality product to our customers
• Identify technical debt and performance bottlenecks within our systems, come up with a plan to improve them, and release them to production.
• Completing an impactful project that is well-baked, bug-free, and released to the whole engineering organization
• Working and communicating effectively with other groups across the organization to ensure big-picture alignment and encourage cross-team collaboration
• Forming a career growth plan with your manager and beginning to work towards it

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

• Being the go-to expert of your teams’ systems at the company
• Owning cross-organizational projects, demonstrating project management skills, consensus building, and strong leadership
• Actively mitigating risk of failed delivery and missed deadlines through courageous, transparent communication with colleagues and stakeholders throughout a project life cycle
• Leading technical architecture meetings
• Mentoring junior engineers, helping them level up technically
• Building connections with members from other teams through active networking and community building
• Having 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.

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

The base pay range for this role is $125,400 (min), $156,800 (mid), $188,200 (max) CAD annually. Individual base pay is based on various factors, including work location, relevant experience and skills, the responsibility of the role, and job duties/requirements. 

The listed ranges represent the full earning potential in this position. Starting salaries for well-qualified new hires are typically around the midpoint of the range. These ranges were determined by a market-based compensation approach; we used data from trusted third-party compensation sources to set equitable, consistent, and competitive ranges. We also evaluate compensation bi-annually, identify any changes in the market and make adjustments to our ranges and existing employee compensation as needed.

Base pay is only one element of an employee's total compensation at Sprout. Every Sprout team member has an opportunity to receive restricted stock units (RSUs) under Sprout’s equity plan. We have outlined the various components to an employee’s full compensation package here to help you to understand our total rewards package.

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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