Staff Site Reliability Engineer

Description

Sprout Social is looking for a Staff Site Reliability Engineer to join our Tooling team and help shape how engineers build, test, deploy, and operate software across the company.

Why join Sprout’s Engineering team?

Great developer experience has company-wide impact. Tooling team builds the platforms, automation, and workflows that help Sprout’s engineers ship better software faster. Our scope spans CI/CD and continuous delivery, AI-assisted development and engineering agents, internal developer tools, and observability. As a Staff engineer, you’ll set technical direction and stay close to the code, turning complex problems into reliable tools that teams want to use. You’ll partner with engineers across Sprout to understand what slows them down, improve their daily workflows, and measure the difference your work makes. 

What you’ll do

• Define technical direction for developer tooling alongside the Tooling Engineering Manager and engineering partners. Turn ambiguous, cross-team problems into architecture, practical milestones, and working software.
• Design, build, and evolve our CI/CD and continuous delivery platforms. Reduce build and test times, improve pipeline reliability, and make releases faster and safer across different services and application stacks.
• Build AI-first engineering workflows, including AI-assisted coding and agents that support development, testing, and operational tasks. Evaluate tools, integrate them into the software delivery lifecycle, and establish patterns other teams can adopt.
• Partner with Product Engineering, Infrastructure, and Security to create secure-by-default, self-service workflows. Lead adoption through clear documentation, thoughtful migrations, and direct collaboration with the engineers who use your tools.
• Lead technical initiatives across teams, building alignment on design decisions and tradeoffs. Measure outcomes through CI duration, developer feedback, platform adoption, software delivery performance, and operational health.
• Multiply the impact of other engineers through design reviews, code reviews, pairing, mentorship, and reusable engineering patterns. Combine technical leadership with hands-on implementation.
• Improve engineering observability and developer integrations so teams can understand and troubleshoot their systems. Own the long-term reliability and maintenance of the tools you build, and automate repetitive work.

What you’ll bring

We’re looking for a curious, pragmatic engineer who combines strong software engineering skills with experience building platforms for other developers. You enjoy investigating why a pipeline is slow, listening to feedback, and testing ideas across different services. You can connect long-term technical direction to incremental delivery, bring others along without formal authority, and take responsibility for systems throughout their lifecycle.

The minimum qualifications for this role include:

• 7+ years of experience developing and operating production software, with strong programming skills in a language such as Python, Go, Java, or Ruby.
• Experience designing, building, and improving CI/CD systems and software delivery workflows, including diagnosing build, test, and deployment bottlenecks.
• Hands-on experience using AI-assisted development tools and evaluating their output through code review, testing, and validation. Ability to identify where AI or agent-based workflows improve engineering work and where human judgment and controls are essential.
• Experience leading complex technical initiatives across multiple teams: setting direction, writing design proposals, making tradeoffs, coordinating dependencies, and delivering measurable outcomes.
• Experience building reliable internal platforms or developer tools, including operating production services, troubleshooting distributed systems, and reducing operational toil.
• Strong collaboration and communication skills, with a track record of mentoring engineers and influencing technical decisions across teams.
• Professional English proficiency in verbal and written communication

Preferred qualifications for this role include:

• Experience with AWS, Kubernetes, and infrastructure automation using tools such as Terraform.
• Experience building or integrating engineering agents or shared AI development platforms, including evaluation, access controls, and monitoring of quality, reliability, and cost.
• Experience with observability platforms and integrations such as Datadog, Sentry, Grafana, or OpenTelemetry.
• Experience with GitHub Actions, Jenkins modernization, deployment orchestration, source control automation, package management, or artifact repositories.
• Experience using software delivery metrics, such as DORA metrics, alongside developer feedback to prioritize and validate improvements.

How you’ll grow

Within 1 month, you’ll plant your roots, including:

• Complete Sprout’s onboarding and learn about our products, engineering culture, and the customers our platforms ultimately support.
• Align with your manager on Staff-level expectations, initial priorities, and your growth goals. Build relationships with Tooling and partner teams in Poland and the US.
• Learn our CI/CD platforms, deployment tools, AI engineering workflows, and observability ecosystem, including GitHub Actions, Jenkins, and Datadog.
• Trace the developer journey from local development to production. Gather feedback and establish a baseline for an initial improvement opportunity.

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

• Deliver an initial improvement to a developer workflow, with a clear baseline and evidence of its impact.
• Develop a working understanding of our platform architecture, software delivery lifecycle, and the needs of teams using our tools.
• Use observability and pipeline data to investigate performance and reliability issues and identify recurring sources of developer friction.
• Build the operational knowledge needed to support Tooling-owned services, troubleshoot issues, and improve their reliability.
• Contribute to code and design reviews, pairing with teammates and sharing what you learn.
• Use experimentation and developer feedback to test assumptions and improve the team’s tools and ways of working.
• Lead a design proposal for a cross-team initiative, aligning stakeholders on the problem, success measures, tradeoffs, dependencies, and rollout approach.
• Identify opportunities to reduce maintenance burden through automation, simpler designs, and better self-service capabilities.

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

• Lead delivery and adoption of a meaningful improvement to CI/CD, AI development workflows, or observability across multiple engineering teams.
• Partner with product engineers to refine the solution using their feedback and support adoption through documentation, migration tooling, and hands-on collaboration.
• Resolve performance or reliability bottlenecks across build, deployment, and integration environments, and use what you learn to improve shared platform patterns.
• Demonstrate measurable gains in developer experience or delivery performance while maintaining quality, security, and reliability.
• Communicate progress, risks, and technical decisions clearly across teams, building alignment and resolving dependencies.
• Mentor teammates through implementation and design decisions, and revisit your growth plan with your manager.

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

• Be a trusted technical partner for Tooling and the engineering teams that rely on its platforms.
• Shape a multi-quarter technical roadmap with your manager and engineering partners, balancing developer needs, platform health, and strategic investment.
• Lead cross-team initiatives from discovery through rollout and ongoing operation, addressing risks early and communicating tradeoffs transparently.
• Guide architecture decisions and establish reusable patterns that make development, delivery, and operations simpler across Sprout.
• Demonstrate sustained improvements in CI performance, delivery reliability, platform adoption, and developer satisfaction.
• Help engineers grow their technical judgment and ability to lead initiatives through mentorship, pairing, and thoughtful feedback.
• Build lasting partnerships across engineering and use them to identify the next high-impact opportunities for Tooling.
• Advance AI-first development practices through evaluated tools and agents, clear guidance, and workshops that help engineers use them effectively and responsibly.
• Bring your own ideas for improving how Sprout engineers work, and help turn the most promising ones into capabilities used across the company.

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.
• Home Office Support: 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: 28,800 PLN – 36,000 PLN 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 28,800 PLN – 43,300 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.

If you require a reasonable accommodation for any part of the interview process or to submit your application, please email us at accommodations@sproutsocial.com. Include the nature of your request and your preferred contact information. We'll do everything we can to support your success during our recruitment process while upholding your privacy. Please note that only inquiries regarding accommodations will receive a response from this email address; other inquiries will not be addressed (e.g., you send your resume but are not requesting an accommodation). 

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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