Staff Software Engineer, Backend - Platform, Java

Description

Sprout Social is looking to hire a Staff Software Engineer, Backend to the Engineering team.

Why join Sprout’s Engineering team?

With collaborative cross-functional teams that span mobile, front-end, back-end 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. On a daily basis, we process tens of billions of requests and tens of billions of asynchronous events. We also ingest billions of social messages every day, and ship more than 1,000 production deployments every month. 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

• Ensure service excellence and maintain robust, scalable technical foundations, leveraging technologies such as Java, Python, MySQL, NSQ, Hbase, AWS, and Kubernetes.
• Help lead the team through complex product and technical roadmaps, guiding them to consistently successful outcomes. 
• Work to improve the processes, systems, and tools we use to deliver quality products and champion technical initiatives and direction.
• Build processes to proactively identify and address technical issues as part of team delivery or escalate larger initiatives for prioritization with team leadership.
• Provide technical mentoring for engineers across the team and facilitate learning through pairing, documentation, and workshops.

What you’ll bring

We’re looking for a deeply technical, creative, collaborative, pragmatic, highly motivated, and inquisitive leader to join our team in building great software. If you love solving hard problems, delivering and sustaining high-quality software, and confidently guiding your peers to learn from and teach each other, we’d love to talk with you!

The minimum qualifications for this role include:

• 7+ years experience developing and supporting software in a production environment
• 5+ years experience programming in an object oriented language such as Java, Python, C# or C++
• 3+ years experience leading engineering projects and initiatives, including the design, development, and implementation of distributed systems, ensuring delivery of reliable services, prioritizing technical improvements with cross-functional teams, and/or driving technical vision.
• Professional English proficiency in verbal and written communication
• Based in or near Kraków, with occasional availability to work from the office

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

• 5+ years experience developing and supporting scalable, distributed backend services
• Experience working with cloud computing technologies such as AWS or GCP 
• 3 years experience working with SQL and/or NoSQL databases
• Professional Polish proficiency in verbal and written communication

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.
• Get acclimated to the team's current Objectives and Key Results, along with future product roadmap priorities.
• Learn about our current multi-product Identity and Access Management technical vision.
• Deploy and make changes to our production systems.
• Become familiar with the team’s current Service Level Agreements (SLAs) that ensure a world-class customer experience, as well as the SLOs and SLIs we use to proactively track our performance against our SLAs.
• Collaborate regularly with product managers, product designers, engineers, and other product teams to deliver value to our users.
• Embrace regular team feedback on your work through code reviews and pairing.
  
  

Within 3 months, you will:

• Begin operating as the access domain’s technical owner by leading initiatives, coordinating with stakeholders, and assuming responsibility for our quality of service.
• Work with product managers, UX developers, back-end and front-end engineers to lead your first feature delivery, with deliverables broken into an MVP and iterative milestones.
• Proactively build relationships with members on other teams through active networking and community building.
• Decompose work into small, similarly-sized units so that task-level estimation is trivial.
• Become an active participant in code reviews and retrospectives, continuously providing guidance and feedback to others.
• Foster a positive culture on your teams as an intrinsic side effect of the way you communicate and collaborate. 
• Work with your team to create and prioritize quarterly team goals.
• Be the first line of defense against product outages and bugs while on support duty.

Within 6 months, you will:

• Design, create, and maintain access platform solutions that execute at internet scale in a cost effective manner.
• Apply your expertise to enhance our existing use of monitoring and alerting tools, thereby ensuring we know about problems before our end users or other back-end teams reliant on our platform.
• Identify technical debt and performance bottlenecks within our systems, come up with a plan to improve them, and release them to production.
• Frequently partner with other engineers to iterate on our existing technical strategy in service of our overall vision.
• Lead technical design planning and facilitate peer review for new feature ideas. 
• Mentor engineers, helping them level up technically.
• Author your career growth plan with your manager’s support and work towards it.

Within 12 months, you will:

• Be the go-to expert of your teams’ systems at the company.
• Utilize the cross-organization connections you’ve built to identify areas of need across our platform, and create plans that incorporate big-picture technical alignment with other leaders.
• Own cross-organizational projects and architecture, demonstrating project management skills, consensus building, and strong leadership.
• Actively mitigate risk of failed delivery and missed deadlines through courageous, transparent communication with colleagues and stakeholders throughout a project life cycle.
• Have opportunities to 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 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:

• Stock Ownership (RSUs): Eligibility for Restricted Stock Units (RSUs)
• Generous Paid Time Off: 26 paid days off annually, in addition to bank holidays and extra company-wide "Rest & Recharge" days.
• Paid Parental Leave: We support all growing families with 20 weeks of paid leave for birthing parents and 16 weeks of paid leave for non-birthing parents.
• Lifestyle Spending Account (LSA): An annual $600 USD fund to support your personal well-being. This can be used for gym memberships, health expenses, hobbies, or other wellness needs.
• Remote & Hybrid Work Support: A flexible, remote-first model supported by a one-time $550 USD home office setup stipend and a monthly internet reimbursement.
• Mental Health & Well-being: Access to dedicated mental health resources and company-wide wellness programs.
• International Travel: Opportunities to travel to our Chicago HQ for team meetups and collaboration.
• Kraków Office Perks: A daily 50 zł lunch stipend when you choose to work from our office.

*This list is for informational purposes only. Benefit offerings are discretionary and subject to change and do not constitute a contract or guarantee of benefits.
Our salary ranges reflect the expected earning potential for this role. Individual pay is based on geographic zone, relevant experience, and skills.

Our current hiring range for this role: 29,500 PLN – 36,800 PLN Net monthly. Offers are made within this range, with opportunities to grow within the broader band based on performance and impact.

We share both our current hiring range and our broader geographic salary bands to provide transparency into our compensation philosophy. This ensures you understand not only your starting potential but also the long-term growth opportunities available as you progress in your role.

The full base pay range for this role is 29,500 PLN – 44,200 PLN monthly.

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.

Whenever possible, we want to provide team members the flexibility to work in the location that makes the most sense for them. If you prefer an office setting, this role may be based in our Kraków location. If you prefer to work remotely from another location within Poland, we will accommodate you as best as possible. 

If you are based in another location within EMEA, we aren’t able to hire in your location at this time.

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