Associate Software Engineer - New Grad

At Sprout Social, we are building software that is made to last. Our 30,000+ customers rely on us daily to reliably connect them with their customers, so scalability and performance are top of mind. Sprout Social is used by companies and organizations like DoorDash, General Mills, Trello, and Make-a-wish Foundation who rely on Sprout to create stronger relationships with their customers through social media. 

Code quality is an essential ingredient to keeping our platform flexible and rapidly reacting to changes in the market and social media networks. We use a variety of technologies, like Java, Python, MySQL, Cassandra, Hadoop, Elasticsearch, NSQ, Docker, and Kubernetes, to ensure our systems execute at scale, and React and Redux to build intuitive user experiences. 

In our engineering program for new graduates, you’ll be embedded as a member of our cross-functional engineering teams in an Agile development environment, and have the opportunity to try different engineering disciplines (back-end, front-end, site reliability engineering, or mobile). Our engineers work in tandem with product designers and product managers to drive our product initiatives to successful outcomes. Our small teams (7-10 people) provide a friendly and supportive atmosphere to learn while shipping production software.

At Sprout, we'll help you grow your skills and your career through onboarding, mentorship, and the opportunity to pair with more senior engineers.  You’ll have the opportunity to work with a diverse group of individuals, propose product and technical changes, and deliver best-in-class software. If you’re passionate about solving complex problems and building large scale applications using cutting edge technologies, we’d love to talk with you! 

Note: Applicants to this role should plan to start full-time in the summer of 2023 from either our Chicago or Seattle offices or remotely in one of our approved states listed in the dropdown menu below.

Qualifications

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

• Expected bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field in December 2022 or Spring 2023

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

• Experience with some of the technologies and languages within our stack: Java, Python, Javascript 
• Previous software engineering internship experience

Within 1 month, you will:

• Experience Sprout’s in-depth onboarding, covering everything from our company mission and values, hearing directly from executives and founders, to deep training on our products and the value that Sprout delivers to our customers.
• Make a plan with your manager to set initial priorities, align on expectations for your role, plant goalposts for your career, and learn about Sprout’s approach to engineering.
• Learn how code is deployed to our end users through collaboration with engineers on your team.
• Collaborate regularly with your product manager, product designer and fellow engineers to deliver value to our users.
• Get regular team feedback on your code through code reviews.
• Deliver business value by shipping your first code change with active pairing/mentoring from your teammates.

Within 3 months, you will:

• Focus on code quality with meaningful test coverage and legibility.
• Have a firm understanding of the team’s roadmap and the team’s Agile processes.
• Contribute to our Agile culture of continuous improvement through retrospective meetings and experimentation-oriented thinking.
• Build connections with members from other teams through active networking and community building
• Attend technical design meetings with your teammates to walk through new feature ideas. 
• Maintain and build upon systems that handle hundreds of thousands of messages a day. 
• Build your engineering skills by attending in-house presentations, workshops, and training sessions.

Within 6 months, you will:

• Independently own and deliver stories with peer consultation given user acceptance criteria and visual mockups.
• Work with your product manager and fellow engineers to create and prioritize quarterly team goals.
• Collaborate with product managers, product designers, and engineers to come up with the MVPs of new features.
• Have your first performance conversation with your manager, where you’ll discuss your accomplishments in your role and work together to build goals for your professional growth.

Within 12 months, you will:

• Have a track record of owning and delivering small-to-medium features on time, from implementation to testing to final delivery.
• Integrate and use monitoring and alerting tools to know about problems before our users.
• Participate in architecture discussions with senior team members.
• Understand trade-offs that exist with engineering solutions, knowing that solutions can favor faster delivery with less strict technical requirements or solutions can favor future technical maintainability with delayed delivery of customer value.
• Contribute to technical initiatives that improve the health of the team’s systems.
• Understand how the team uses frameworks and software dependencies and help keep them up to date
• 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.

As part of our commitments to DEI and social impact, Sprout Social has partnered with the United Negro College Fund (UNCF) to offer college seniors the opportunity to apply for scholarships and interview for our full-time Associate Software Engineer opportunity. Qualified applicants for this role are also eligible to apply to this scholarship through our UNCF application portal, where you’ll find more information about the program and eligibility requirements.

About Sprout Social
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. 

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 [email protected] 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. 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.