Senior Software Engineer, Platform (Java)

Description

Sprout Social is looking to hire a Senior 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 we build, scale, ship, and monitor our platform reliably, leveraging technologies such as Java, Python, MySQL, NSQ, Hbase, AWS, and Kubernetes.
• Partner with product managers, designers, and other engineers to define requirements and complete feature work.
• Work to improve the processes, systems, and tools we use to deliver quality products and champion technical initiatives and direction.
• Uphold project quality and planning through meeting deadlines, breaking down work, and ensuring proper testing and monitoring
• Lift the skills of other engineers through mentorship, knowledge sharing, and providing feedback on PRs and technical designs.

What you’ll bring

We’re looking for a creative, collaborative, highly motivated, and inquisitive learner to help us deliver a great product to our customers. If you’re passionate about building and scaling reliable systems, we’d love to talk with you!

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

• 4 years experience developing and supporting software in a production environment
• 3 years experience programming in object-oriented languages such as Java, Python, or C++
• 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:

• 3 years experience developing and supporting scalable, distributed backend services
• 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:

• Completing Sprout’s New Hire training program alongside other new Sprout team members.
• Deploying and making changes to our production systems.
• Interacting with SQL or NoSQL data stores and NSQ messaging queues.
• Collaborating regularly with product managers, and other product teams to deliver value to our users.
• Getting regular team feedback on your work through code reviews and pairing.
• Proactively monitoring the health of our services in production to ensure our customers always have a world-class experience

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

• Decomposing work into small, similarly sized units so that estimation is unnecessary.
• Working with your squad to create and prioritize quarterly team goals.
• Contributing to our Agile culture of continuous improvement through retrospective meetings and experimentation-oriented thinking.
• Building connections with members from other teams through guild meetings and chapter outings.
• Participating in technical design meetings with your teammates to walk through new feature ideas. 
• Working with product managers, UX developers, and front-end engineers to come up with the MVPs of new features.
• Being the first line of defense against product outages and bugs while on support duty.
• Maintaining, scaling, and building upon systems that handle millions requests and messages a day. 

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

• Integrating and using monitoring and alerting tools to know about problems before our users.
• Being “point person” on a project, including prototyping, writing design documents, coordinating dependencies, and acting as domain owner.
• Creating and managing concurrent, distributed systems.
• Building your engineering skills by attending in-house presentations, workshops, and training sessions.
• Forming a career growth plan with your manager and work towards it.
• Partnering with the Infrastructure team to improve your team’s ability to deliver reliable, highly available services.

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

• Actively mitigating risk of failed delivery and missed deadlines through courageous, transparent communication with colleagues and stakeholders throughout a project life cycle.
• Leading technical architecture meetings. 
• Identifying technical debt and performance bottlenecks within our systems, come up with a plan to improve the code, and get it pushed to production.
• Mentoring junior engineers, helping them level up technically.
• Building connections with members from other teams through active networking and community building.
• Having 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.
• 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: 24,300 PLN – 30,400 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 24,300 PLN – 36,500 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.

#LI-REMOTE