Principal Engineer - Front-End

At Sprout Social, we are building software made to last. Our 30,000+ customers rely on us daily to connect them with their customers. So reliability, scalability, and performance are top of mind. Companies like the Chicago Bulls, Sony Electronics, Indiana University, Make-a-Wish Foundation, Edelman, and Subaru rely on Sprout Social to create relationships with their customers through social media.

Code quality is an essential ingredient to keeping our platform flexible. Our systems execute at scale while staying nimble to keep up with new capabilities offered by social network APIs. Our team uses a variety of technologies, including React, Redux, Styled Components, and Jest.

As a Principal Engineer, you will help empower teams to be more productive, overcome problems, and achieve results. You will partner with engineering leaders to develop a strategy to enhance our web architecture to meet long-term business goals. You’ll go on to implement this plan and work with teams across the organization to make it a reality. Along the way, you’ll champion great engineering habits, mentor engineers, and partner with product leaders to reach challenging goals. 

We’re looking for a creative, collaborative, pragmatic, motivated, and inquisitive technical leader to join our team in building great software. If you can solve hard problems, deliver quality web software, and confidently guide your peers to learn from and teach each other, we’d love to talk with you!

Qualifications

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

• 13+ years of experience developing and supporting software in a production environment with a focus on web technologies (Javascript, React, etc.).
• A proven track record of leading the delivery of complex projects that span multiple teams and have a bottom-line impact.
• Experience at the collaborative design of a multi-year vision for architecture and iterative delivery of that vision across teams, functions, and departments.
• Demonstrated passion for customer experience and usability.
• A history of collaborating across organizational boundaries with Product Managers and Designers.
• Desire to be hands-on to debug complex issues and ensure the success of critical projects.

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

• 2+ years of hands-on experience as a principal-level software engineer.
• Solid design and coding skills with a bias for architecture
• Experience with AWS or other cloud providers.
• Experience building RESTful APIs with best practices.
• A history of championing good engineering habits.
• Coaching and mentoring other engineers

Within 1 month, you will:

• 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 building software.
• Get acclimated to the team's current mission, goals, and objectives, along with future product roadmaps.
• Deploy and make changes to our production systems.
• 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.

Within 3 months, you will:

• Build connections with members from other teams through active networking and community building.
• 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 zone events.
• Participate in technical design meetings with your teammates to walk through new feature ideas. 
• Work with product managers, UX developers, and back-end engineers to scope 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 per day. 
• Write design documents, coordinate dependencies, and act as the domain owner for new projects.

Within 6 months, you will:

• Have your first performance conversation with your manager, where you’ll discuss your accomplishments in your role and work together to build goals for your professional growth.
• Craft a technical vision for our web systems alongside engineering leadership.
• Identify technical debt and performance bottlenecks within our systems, define a plan to improve the code, and get it pushed to production.
• Effectively communicate with other groups across the organization to ensure big-picture alignment and encourage cross-team collaboration.
• Integrate and use monitoring tools to know about problems before our users.
• Lead technical design meetings with your team to scope out new feature ideas. 
• Form a career growth plan with your manager and work towards it.
• Partner with Engineering Directors to improve your team’s ability to deliver reliable and performant web applications.

Within 12 months, you will:

• Be the go-to expert of Sprout Social’s web architecture
• Own cross-organizational projects, demonstrating project management skills, consensus building, and leadership.
• Actively mitigate the risk of failed delivery and missed deadlines through courageous, transparent communication with colleagues and stakeholders throughout a project.
• Lead technical architecture meetings. 
• Identify technical debt and performance bottlenecks within our systems, devise a plan to improve the code, and get it pushed to production.
• Mentor junior engineers, helping them level up technically.
• Build connections with members from other teams through active networking and community building.
• 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 your team in beneficial ways that we haven’t even considered.

Of course, the outline above is an ideal timeline. Things may shift based on business needs and other 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. Our team’s shared belief in Sprout’s mission promotes a culture of openness, empowerment and fun. 

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
• 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. For those that prefer an office setting, this role may be based in our Chicago or Seattle locations. If you prefer to work from your home, we can accommodate that for many locations across the United States. We are not set up in all states, however, so please take a look at the drop down box in our application to see whether your state is listed.

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 2021 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. 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.