Engineering Manager - Database Reliability 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.  

We’re looking for an Engineering Manager to lead our Database Reliability Engineering (DBRE) team. Its mission is to deliver a reliable, scalable, secure, and cost-effective data layer to power all our products. We build “Paved Roads”: a menu of standardized, production-grade database technologies that all of our product teams leverage to deliver value quickly with technologies like MySQL, Elasticsearch and HBase. We also partner closely with product engineering teams to provide subject matter expertise to ensure excellent outcomes on novel product features. We 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.

You will be responsible for helping set the team’s roadmap in concert with stakeholders, ensuring consistently high engineering quality, proactively developing your team’s talent and growing them in their careers, and working alongside your direct reports by getting your hands dirty. It’s important to note: our engineers do not operate as lone wolves or “10x devs.” Instead, we work in diverse, collaborative teams that get the best results sustainably.

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!

Qualifications 

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

• 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.

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

• 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

Within 1 month, you will:

• 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 will:

• Learn Sprout's management practices and tools.
• Begin formally managing your team.
• Collaborate with your team members and fellow developers to deliver value to our users.
• Engage regularly with the team, Infrastructure Director, and other stakeholders to prioritize upcoming project work to ensure we meet our most critical objectives.
• Participate 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 will:

• Successfully migrate critical legacy datastores to managed database technologies to reduce operational load and increase reliability.
• Partner with product teams to deliver database solutions at scale that enable powerful features for our customers.
• Collaborate with development teams to influence data structure and storage decisions.
• Shadow a team member and then join the on-call rotation – don’t worry we’ve got your back!
• Debug reliability and scalability issues across multiple layers of the stack and multiple database technologies.
• Meet with direct reports regularly and provide them with specific constructive feedback on their work and help them formulate career growth plans.
• Mentor engineers to provide guidance and coaching on code implementation, design review, and other software engineering and agile practices.
• 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.
• Form a career growth plan with your manager and work towards it.

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.
• Lead efforts to maintain and improve the reliability, scalability, and security for our data layer.
• Collaborate with the team to identify technical debt and come up with a plan to improve, and weave that work in with projects.
• Work 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.
• Help 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.
• 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.

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