Senior Site Reliability Engineer

Job Description

At Sprout Social we are building software that is made to last. Our 20,000+ customers depend on us daily to connect them with their customers, so reliability, scalability, and performance are top of mind. Our software is used by companies like Evernote, Grubhub, Subaru and Edelman to create stronger relationships with their customers through social media. Each day, our platform processes 10s of millions of social media messages and our APIs handle over 10 billion requests per year to deliver our software to customers in over 100 countries.

On our Infrastructure engineering team, we strive to create “Paved Roads”: standard production-ready technology that all of our engineering teams can leverage to deliver value quickly. At the same time, we seek to empower product engineering teams to take on as much production ownership for their services as possible. We work to improve all aspects of engineering through automation, observability of metrics, and clear processes in order to build sustainable and fault tolerant solutions. Learning from system failures and human mistakes is part of our culture.

We do not operate as lone wolves or “10x devs.” Instead, we are building diverse, collaborative teams that get the best results sustainably. Our Site Reliability Engineers work in tandem with Web, Platform, and QA Engineers to drive our product initiatives to successful outcomes.

We are looking for a creative, collaborative, highly motivated, and pragmatic engineer to help us design and build reliable, scalable, performant systems that empower engineers to rapidly and safely deliver value to our customers. If this sounds like you and you want to be on a team that has a huge impact across all of engineering, we’d love to talk with you!

Our engineering team is continuing to grow in 2020. As opportunities emerge, we are looking to find the best possible team members who want to grow their career as Sprout continues to grow. If you want to be on our radar as we have new openings, please share your resume for review. Applicants to this posting will only be contacted by a recruiter if we identify a position where there is a potential fit.

Within 1 month, you will:

• Complete Sprout’s New Hire training program and learn about our product
• Contribute to feature work
• Interact with our hosting platforms and perform operations tasks
• Collaborate with your team members and fellow developers to deliver value to our users
• Receive feedback on pull request(s) and actively pair with teammates
• Shadow a team member for an on-call rotation
• Become familiar with how we use key technologies such as Terraform, Chef, and Kubernetes
• Become familiar with the observability tools utilized by our team such as Graphite, Grafana, Datadog, and Nagios

Within 3 months, you will:

• Complete your first end to end project, such as a new infrastructure deployment using Chef and Terraform
• Gain familiarity with our platform architecture
• Learn about and interact with some of our key storage technologies: MySQL, Cassandra, Elasticsearch, Hadoop
• Learn about our use of NSQ in our streaming data ingest pipeline
• Use our observability tools to troubleshoot production performance or stability issues
• Join our on-call rotation (don’t worry we’ve got your back!)
• Focus on code quality with meaningful test coverage
• 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
• Proactively identify, document, and schedule future work to be done, working toward eliminating operational toil

Within 6 months, you will

• Help complete a impactful project that is well-baked and bug-free
• Contribute to our Kubernetes platform
• Write design documents, gather feedback from peers, coordinate dependencies, and be a domain owner for a new project
• 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 distributed systems
• Build effective working relationships with team members across engineering through active networking, collaboration, and community building
• Influence other developers and model engineering best practices
• Help promote DevOps culture by working with engineers to assume operational ownership

Within 12 months, you will

• Be comfortable and confident in most technical aspects of your team’s core systems and services
• Continue growing your knowledge of our environment and services
• Actively mitigate risk of poor quality or missed deadlines
• Continually evaluate and refine your technical toolkit: teach what you learn to the team
• Retire a service that is EOL and clean up artifacts
• Have opportunities to contribute to in-house technical presentations and workshops that share your expertise with large groups of Sprout engineers
• Have opportunities to advocate for Sprout Engineering in the software community by participating/speaking at conferences, user groups, etc.
• Mentor junior engineers via pairing, design review, and code review
• 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 is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer and an 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, marital status, order of protection status, citizenship status, or other applicable legally protected characteristics. We also consider qualified applicants with criminal histories, consistent with applicable federal, state and local law. If you need a reasonable accommodation for any part of the employment process, please contact us by email at [email protected] and let us know the nature of your request and your contact information. Requests for accommodation will be considered on a case-by-case basis. 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. 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. We value the things that make us different and want to see how you can make our team better!