Engineering Manager - Back End

Sprout Social is looking to hire an Engineering Manager to the Engineering 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

• Embed in one of our engineering squads and ensure we build, scale, ship, and monitor our platform reliably.
• Develop your team’s talent and grow them in their careers
• Partner closely with Engineering and Product leaders to set the roadmap and keep the team accountable to deliverables.
• Work alongside your direct reports to build robust, scalable, and performant services using Java, Python and more.
• Ensure consistently high engineering quality

What you’ll bring

We are looking for a creative, collaborative, technical leader to help us deliver a great product to our customers. If you’re passionate about building and scaling reliable systems and excited to guide other engineers with their careers, we’d love to talk with you!

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

• 1+ year of experience managing or leading engineering teams
• 4+ years experience developing and supporting software in a production environment
• 3+ 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:

• 3+ years experience developing and supporting scalable, distributed backend services
• 3+ years experience working with databases

How you’ll grow

Within 1 month, you’ll plant your roots, including:

• Complete Sprout’s in-depth onboarding, covering our company mission and values, hearing directly from executives and founders, and in-depth training on our products and the value that Sprout delivers to our customers.
• 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 product engineering and engineering management.
• Deploy and make changes to our production systems.
• Interact with SQL or NoSQL data stores and NSQ messaging queues
• 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.
• Log into our remote Linux servers and monitor the status of our services. 

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

• Learning Sprout's management practices and tools and beginning to formally manage your team.
• Decompose work into small, similarly sized units so that estimation is unnecessary.
• 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 chapter outings.
• Participate in technical design meetings with your teammates to walk through new feature ideas.
• Work with product managers, UX developers, and front-end engineers 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 systems that handle hundreds of thousands of messages a day. 

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

• Meeting with direct reports regularly and providing them with direct constructive feedback on their work as well as formulating career growth plans.
• Participate in management workshops designed to level-up your feedback and coaching skills.
• Mentor junior teammates to provide guidance and coaching on code implementation, design review, and other software engineering and Agile practices.
• 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.
• Creating, deploying, and managing concurrent, distributed systems.
• Forming a career growth plan with your manager and working towards it.

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.
• Lead technical architecture meetings. 
• 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 engineers, 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, 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

Candidates for this remote work opportunity must be based in either British Columbia or Ontario. If you are based in another location within Canada, we aren’t able to hire in your location at this time; however, if you’d like to stay in touch with us in case that changes in the future, please apply and we’ll save your application for possible future consideration.

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