Software Engineer - Back End (Remote)

We know experience is built in a number of ways. Even if your background doesn’t match the exact requirements, we encourage you to apply and share any relevant skills in a cover letter. Sprout welcomes all candidates to apply, including those who identify as BIPOC, women and underrepresented genders in tech, LGBTQIA+, parents, veterans, persons with disabilities and people of all faiths.

Software Engineer - Back End

Sprout Social is looking to hire a 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 

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

What you’ll bring 

These are the minimum qualifications that our hiring team is looking for in this role:

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

Additionally, these are the preferred qualifications that would indicate a particularly strong candidate:

• 2+ years experience developing and supporting scalable, distributed backend services
• 2+ years experience working with databases

How you’ll grow

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 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.
• 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 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 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..

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 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.

Individual base pay is based on various factors, including work location, relevant experience and skills, the responsibility of the role, and job duties/requirements. In the United States, we have two geographic pay zones. You can confirm the pay zone for your specific location with your recruiter during your interview process. For this role, our current base pay ranges for new hires in each zone are:

• Zone 1: $130,000 to $155,000 USD annually
• Zone 2: $125,000 to $145,000 USD annually

Sprout’s compensation ranges are intentionally broad to allow for our team members' growth within their role. 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. 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. We have outlined the various components to an employee’s full compensation package here to help you to understand our total rewards package.

Sprout Social is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer and an Affirmative Action Employer. We do not discriminate based on identity- race, color, religion, national origin or ancestry, sex (including sexual identity), age, physical or mental disability, pregnancy, veteran or military status, unfavorable discharge from military service, genetic information, sexual orientation, marital status, order of protection status, citizenship status, arrest record or expunged or sealed convictions, or any other legally recognized protected basis under federal, state, or local law. Learn more about our commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion in our latest DEI Report.

If you need a reasonable accommodation for any part of the employment process, please contact us by email at accommodations@sproutsocial.com and let us know the nature of your request and your contact information. We'll do all we can to ensure you're set up for success during our interview process while upholding your privacy, including requests for accommodation. Please note that only inquiries concerning a request for reasonable accommodation will be responded to from this email address.

For more information about our commitment to equal employment opportunity, please click here (1) Equal Opportunity Employment Poster  (2) Sprout Social's Affirmative Action Statement (3) Pay Transparency Statement. 

When you apply for employment with Sprout Social, we will process your job applicant data, including your employment and education history, transcript, writing samples, and references as necessary to consider your job application for open positions. Your personal data will be shared with Greenhouse Software, Inc., and Crosschq, Inc., cloud services providers located in the United States of America and engaged by Sprout Social to help manage its recruitment and hiring process on Controller’s behalf. Accordingly, if you are located outside of the United States, by clicking “Submit Application” on this site, you consent to the transfer of your personal data to the United States. For more information about our privacy practices please visit our Privacy Policy. California residents have additional rights and should review the Additional Disclosures for California Residents section in our Privacy Policy.

Additionally, Sprout Social participates in the E-Verify program in certain locations, as required by law. 

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