Engineering Manager - Back-End, Observability Engineering

At Sprout Social we are building software to last. Every day our 30,000+ global customers depend on us to connect them with their customers, so reliability, scalability, and performance are top of mind. Sprout Social is used by organizations like DoorDash, General Mills, Trello, Make-a-wish Foundation, Edelman, and Blue Cross Blue Shield who rely on Sprout to build stronger relationships with their customers through social media.  

The Observability Engineering team’s mission is to provide scalable toolsets and frameworks to support engineers in monitoring, debugging and managing their production services. These tools and processes empower teams to build robust and delightful customer experiences and workflows in safety, at speed, and at scale. As the Engineering Manager for our Observability Engineering team, you’ll lead a team of talented engineers supporting Sprout’s bright product future. You'll partner closely with the team’s product manager to execute on the strategic vision for Sprout’s observability platform and you’ll play a large role in the growth of the engineers on the team. We write software using Java and Python, MySQL, NSQ, Docker, and Kubernetes and leveraging a variety of observability tools including Datadog, OpenTelemetry (Jaeger and Datadog APM), AWS OpenSearch, Sentry and Grafana. 

We do not operate as lone wolves or “10x devs.” Instead, we work in diverse, collaborative teams that get the best results sustainably. Your role will be 'player-coach,' working alongside your direct reports while also dedicating time to help direct and support their professional development. While you should be excited about writing and shipping production-level code, we want you to be equally excited about the trajectory of your team and your part in developing them as stellar software engineers. 

We’re looking for a creative, collaborative, highly motivated, inquisitive learner to build great software with us. If you confidently write web applications using Java and Python, are excited to guide other engineers with their careers, and are passionate about learning, we’d love to talk with you! 

Qualifications

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

• 1+ year experience managing engineering teams
• 7+ years experience developing and supporting software in a production environment
• 7+ years experience programming in object oriented languages such as Java, Python, or C++

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

• 2+ years experience configuring and integrating observability, log management and/or distributed tracing tools
• Experience with advanced usage of Java and Python, such as AOP, custom classloaders, java agents, proxies, annotation processors, metaclasses, decorators and import hooks

Within 1 month, you will:

• Complete Sprout’s New Hire training program alongside other new Sprout team members.
• Make a plan with your director to set initial priorities, align on expectations for your role, plant goalposts for your career, and learn about Sprout’s approach to infrastructure,  production observability, and engineer management
• Collaborate regularly with your product manager and fellow team members to deliver value to engineers
• Get regular team feedback on your code through code reviews.
• Onboard to our core production observability stack including Datadog, our ELK logging pipelines, Kubernetes, our OTel-based distributed tracing infrastructure, and Sentry.

Within 3 months, you will:

• Learn Sprout's management practices and tools.
• Gain familiarity with our platform architecture and software development lifecycle so you can gain perspective on how Sprout engineers build their observability
• Work with your product manager and fellow developers 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.
• Collaborate with Product Managers and other stakeholder teams 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 and build upon critical production observability systems.

Within 6 months, you will:

• Lead the team in partnership with the product manager to successfully deliver on initiatives critical to our revenue platform.
• Meet with direct reports regularly and provide them with direct constructive feedback on their work as well as formulating career growth plans.
• Participate in Engineering management discussions in order to learn from peer managers and to share lessons learned.
• Participate in management workshops designed to level-up your feedback and coaching skills.
• Mentor engineers to provide guidance and coaching on code implementation, design review, and other software engineering and Agile practices.
• Lead technical architecture meetings.
• Integrate and use monitoring and alerting tools to know about problems before our users.
• Be “point person” on a project, including writing design documents, coordinating dependencies, and acting as domain owner.
• Create 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.
• Partner with Infrastructure to improve your team’s ability to deliver reliable, highly available services.

Within 12 months, you will:

• Complete career ladder and performance review evaluations for your direct reports.
• Actively mitigate risk of failed delivery and missed deadlines through courageous, transparent communication with colleagues and stakeholders throughout a project life cycle.
• Identify technical debt and performance bottlenecks within our systems, come up with a plan to improve the code, and get it pushed to production.
• Mentor junior developers, helping them level up technically.
• Build connections with members from other teams through active networking and community building.
• Have opportunities to contribute to in-house technical presentations and workshops that share your expertise with large groups of Sprout developers.
• Surprise us! Use your unique ideas and abilities to change your team 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.