Engineering Manager - Back-End, Observability Engineering
Remote US
Engineering
Engineering Manager - Back-End, Observability Engineering
Description
Sprout Social is looking to hire an Engineering Manager to lead our Visibility 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
- Be in a 'player-coach,' working alongside your direct reports while also dedicating time to help direct and support their professional development.
- Write and ship 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.
- Provide scalable toolsets and frameworks to support engineers in monitoring, debugging and managing their production services.
- 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.
- 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.
What you’ll bring
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!
The minimum qualifications for this role include:
- 1+ year experience managing engineering teams
- 5+ years experience developing and supporting software in a production environment
- 5+ years experience programming in object oriented languages such as Java, Python, or C++
Preferred qualifications for this role include:
- 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
How you’ll grow
Within 1 month, you’ll plant your roots, including:
- 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’ll start hitting your stride by:
- 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’ll be making a clear impact through:
- 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’ll make this role your own by:
- 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.
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.
The base pay range for this role is $185,000.00 to $245,000.00 USD annually. Individual base pay is based on various factors, including work location, relevant experience and skills, the responsibility of the role, and job duties/requirements.
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.
#LI-REMOTE
About Sprout
Sprout Social offers deep social media listening and analytics, social management, customer care, commerce and advocacy solutions to more than 30,000 brands and agencies worldwide.
Sprout’s unified platform integrates the power of social throughout every aspect aspect of a business and enables social leaders at every level to extract extract valuable data and insights that drive their business forward. Sprout operates across major social media networks, including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube and LinkedIn.
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.
