Senior Site Reliability Engineer, SRE Core

Description

Sprout Social is looking to hire a Senior Site Reliability 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

• Design and build reliable, scalable, and performant systems that support Sprout’s global 30,000+ customer base across 100+ countries

• Drive infrastructure initiatives that enable product teams to deliver value quickly and safely through shared, production-ready tools and platforms (“Paved Roads”)

• Collaborate closely with product engineering teams to increase service stewardship and improve operational maturity across the organization

• Enhance automation, observability, and process clarity to foster sustainable and fault-tolerant solutions

• Investigate and learn from system failures and incidents to improve overall system resilience

• Partner cross-functionally with Security, Web, Platform, QA, Data and AI Engineers to support product delivery and reliability

• Contribute to a culture of collaboration, inclusivity, and continuous learning, with a strong emphasis on sustainable engineering practices

• Play a key role in shaping infrastructure strategy that supports tens of millions of social messages processed daily and over 10 billion API requests per year

What you’ll bring

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

• 4+ years building and maintaining reliable, scalable systems in a Linux/UNIX environment

• 4+ years experience with one or more infrastructure-as-code or configuration-as-code tools, such as: Terraform, Chef, Ansible, SaltStack, etc.

• Experience in at least one programming language, such as Python, Java, Golang, or Ruby

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

• 4+ years of experience with cloud platforms, preferably AWS

• 4+ years of experience with containerization and orchestration, preferably Kubernetes (EKS)

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

• Interact with our production infrastructure and perform operational 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

• Ramp up on our core technology stack including AWS, Chef, Terraform, and Kubernetes

• Shadow a team member for an on-call rotation

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

• 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, Elasticsearch, Cassandra, and 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, advocate for, and make high impact improvements to reduce operational toil

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

• Navigating real-world challenges—responding to and learning from unexpected issues in production

Help complete an impactful project that is well-baked and bug-free

• Contribute to architectural enhancements of our Kubernetes service ecosystem, enabling better performance and operational ownership

• 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

• 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’ll make this role your own by:

• Be comfortable and confident in most technical aspects of your team’s core systems and services

• Mentor junior engineers via pairing, design review, and code review

• 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.

• 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.

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 whether you’re located in Zone 1 or Zone 2, as well as relevant experience and skills. In the United States, we have two geographic pay zones. For this role, the expected base pay ranges for new hires are:

• Zone 1 (New York, California, Washington): $151,976 - $209,000 USD annually

• Zone 2 (All other US states): $138,200 - $189,970 USD annually

The listed ranges represent earning potential in this position. 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. 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. Because Sprout Social is a federal contractor, we affirmatively recruit individuals with a disability and protected veterans. Learn more about our commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion in our latest DEI Report.

If you require a reasonable accommodation for any part of the interview process or to submit your application, please email us at [email protected]. Include the nature of your request and your preferred contact information. We'll do everything we can to support your success during our recruitment process while upholding your privacy. Please note that only inquiries regarding accommodations will receive a response from this email address; other inquiries will not be addressed (e.g., you send your resume but are not requesting an accommodation).

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

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