Job description
Sprout Social is looking to hire a Staff Software Engineer to join our Identity and Access Management teams.
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
Our Identity and Access Management (IAM) engineering teams design and build elegant platform capabilities that power multi-tenant experiences across our entire product suite. IAM is central to Sprout’s technical strategy. It enables major R&D investments, including our integration ecosystem and AI agent actions via Sprout’s MCP servers.
Beyond these strategic unlocks, IAM ensures Sprout’s customers can manage user access in fast-moving environments that evolve at the pace of social. Our work amplifies the impact of every Engineering team, and we’re looking for leaders who can elevate others while diving deep into complex technical challenges to deliver solutions that are simple, intuitive, and built to scale.
- Own the technical execution of our IAM vision. You will be the lead designer and builder for new, scalable access control solutions that will be used by all of Sprout’s Product teams.
- Architect and build our next-generation, multi-tenant authorization control plane, designed to manage access across a variety of products, types of principals, and jobs-to-be-done.
- Scale our authorization data plane to scale to billions of requests daily while remaining intuitive and approachable to engineers across the organization.
- Be the engineer accountable for service-level outcomes. You will write the code and set the standards that ensure our core access services are highly available, low-latency, and secure.
- Design and ship the platform-level IAM patterns, libraries, and tools that will multiply the effectiveness of our entire R&D organization.
What you’ll bring
We are looking for a Staff Engineer who leads through craft. Your primary motivation is delivering customer outcomes by solving hard technical problems with simple solutions, and you’re not afraid to be hands-on to get it done. You’re a pragmatic leader who mentors others through your code and design, and you’re driven to build high-quality, high-scale platforms that make every engineer around you better. If you thrive on technical ownership and want to build the systems that secure a platform at our scale, we want to talk to you!
The minimum qualifications for this role include:
- 10+ 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.
Preferred qualifications for this role include:
- 5+ years experience developing and supporting high throughput, scalable, distributed, and resilient authorization solutions
- Experience working with proven IAM standards, such as OAuth 2.0, OIDC, SAML, RBAC, and JWTs
- Experience with emerging standards and technologies, including code generation and the MCP standard
- Experience working with cloud computing technologies such as AWS or GCP
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 Objectives (SLOs) that ensure a world-class customer experience.
- Collaborate regularly with product managers, product designers, engineers, and other product teams to deliver value to our customers.
- 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 milestones centered on customer outcomes.
- Proactively build relationships with members on other teams through active networking and community building.
- Become an active participant in code reviews, retrospectives, and team demos, 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.
- Be the first line of defense against product outages and bugs while on support duty.
- Author your career growth plan with your manager’s support and work towards it.
Within 6 months, you will:
Design, create, and maintain access platform solutions that execute at internet scale in a cost effective manner.
Boost the access team’s impact by identifying and delivering improvements to our libraries, tools, and approach to code generation.
Apply your expertise to enhance our existing use of monitoring and alerting tools, thereby ensuring we know about problems before our customers or other product teams reliant on our platform.
Own and evolve our access technical strategy, partnering closely with peers to shape and refine the broader IAM vision for the organization.
Mentor engineers, helping them level up technically.
Within 12 months, you will:
- Be the go-to expert of our access solutions at the company.
- Utilize the cross-organization connections you’ve built to identify IAM areas of need across our platform, and create plans that incorporate big-picture technical alignment with other leaders.
- Own cross-organizational IAM 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.
- 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:
- 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.
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.
Individual base pay is based on various factors, including work location, relevant experience and skills, the responsibility of the role, and job duties/requirements. In the United States, we have two geographic pay zones. For this role, our current base pay ranges for new hires are:
- Zone 1 (New York, California, Washington): $184,008 (min), $230,000 (mid), $276,012 (max) USD annually
- Zone 2 (All other US states): $167,300 (min), $209,100 (mid), $250,900 (max) USD annually
The listed ranges represent the full earning potential in this position. Starting salaries for well-qualified new hires are typically around the midpoint of the range. 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.
Base pay is only one element of an employee’s total compensation at Sprout. Every Sprout team member has an opportunity to receive restricted stock units (RSUs) under Sprout’s equity plan. Employees (and their dependents) are covered by medical, dental, vision, basic life, accidental death, and dismemberment insurance, and Modern Health (a wellness benefit). Employees are able to enroll in Sprout’s company’s 401k plan, in which Sprout will match 50% of your contributions up to 6% with a maximum contribution. Sprout offers “Flexible Paid Time Off” and ten paid holidays. We have outlined the various components to an employee’s full compensation package here to help you to understand our total rewards package.
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 latest 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.
Additionally, Sprout Social participates in the E-Verify program in certain locations, as required by law.
Sprout Social Inc. and its subsidiaries process personal data submitted through your application to assess your qualifications for employment and to inform our hiring decision and, where applicable, for required governmental reporting. For more information, please review Sprout’s Global Applicant Privacy Notice.
