Engineering Manager - Database Reliability Engineering

Description

Sprout Social is looking to hire an Engineering Manager to lead our Database Reliability Engineering (DBRE) 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

• Deliver a reliable, scalable, secure, and cost-effective data layer to power all our products with technologies like MySQL, Elasticsearch and HBase
• Partner closely with product engineering teams to provide subject matter expertise to ensure excellent outcomes on novel product features
• Proactively invest time to improve all aspects of engineering operations by writing software to automate toil in Java and Python, ensuring high quality observability, and creating clear processes in order to maintain reliability
• Help set the team’s roadmap in concert with stakeholders
• Ensure consistently high engineering quality
• Develop your team’s talent and grow them in their careers

What you’ll bring

We are looking for a creative, collaborative, technical leader to help build highly reliable and scalable database solutions at scale. If you are passionate about infrastructure, excited to guide other engineers with their careers, and want to lead a team that has a massive impact on the success of the entire company, we’d love to talk with you!

The minimum qualifications for this role include:

• 1+ year of experience managing or leading engineering teams
• 7+ years building and maintaining reliable, scalable systems or software in a Linux/UNIX environment
• 3+ years experience operating and maintaining RDBMSs like MySQL, Postgres, etc.

Preferred qualifications for this role include:

• 3+ years experience with one or more of Elasticsearch, HBase, Elastic MapReduce
• 3+ years experience with one or more infrastructure-as-code or configuration-as-code tools, such as: Terraform, CloudFormation, Chef, Puppet, Ansible, SaltStack, etc.
• 3+ years experience programming in at least one language, such as Python, Java, Golang, Ruby, etc.
• 2+ years experience with one or more Cloud providers; AWS, GCP, or similar

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 infrastructure,  product engineering, and engineering management.
• Learn about and interact with our core technologies: MySQL, Elasticsearch, HBase, EMR, NSQ, and Vault.
• Start familiarizing yourself with how we use Terraform, Chef, and Kubernetes to deploy infrastructure, configuration, and code changes.

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

• Learning Sprout's management practices and tools.
• Beginning to formally manage your team.
• Collaborating with your team members and fellow developers to deliver value to our users.
• Engaging regularly with the team, Infrastructure Director, and other stakeholders to prioritize upcoming project work to ensure we meet our most critical objectives.
• Participating in technical design processes with your teammates to gain alignment and ensure we’re building the right things in the right amounts.

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

• Successfully migrating critical legacy datastores to managed database technologies to reduce operational load and increase reliability.
• Partnering with product teams to deliver database solutions at scale that enable powerful features for our customers.
• Collaborating with development teams to influence data structure and storage decisions.
• Shadowing a team member and then joining the on-call rotation – don’t worry we’ve got your back!
• Debugging reliability and scalability issues across multiple layers of the stack and multiple database technologies.
• Meeting with direct reports regularly and providing them with specific constructive feedback on their work and help them formulate career growth plans.
• Mentoring engineers to providing guidance and coaching on code implementation, design review, and other software engineering and agile practices.
• Participating in Engineering management discussions in order to learn from peer managers and to share lessons learned.
• Participating in management workshops designed to level-up your feedback and coaching skills.
• Forming a career growth plan with your manager and working towards it.

Within 12 months, you’ll make this role your own by:

• Completing career ladder and performance review evaluations for your direct reports.
• Actively mitigating risk of failed delivery and missed deadlines through courageous, transparent communication with colleagues and stakeholders throughout a project life cycle.
• Leading efforts to maintain and improve the reliability, scalability, and security for our data layer.
• Collaborating with the team to identify technical debt and come up with a plan to improve, and weave that work in with projects.
• Working directly with other infrastructure team leaders and senior leadership across engineering and product to define and align DBRE’s roadmap with the larger organization’s needs and goals.
• Helping promote and instill SRE principles like SLIs/SLOs/SLAs by working with engineers and product managers to understand how to make realistic tradeoffs in reliability and performance of their systems and services.
• Surprising 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.

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. 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. 

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