Staff Software Engineer - Back End, Access

Company: Sprout Social
Location: Schiller Park
Posted on: June 24, 2025

Job Description:

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. 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 build elegant platform solutions that power multi-tenant features across our entire suite of products. Our solutions help our customers administer user access in dynamic and ever-changing environments, offer granular authorization support for our public APIs, and enforce access controls across our entire product portfolio at scale in our authorization data plane. Our teams collaborate across the entire R&D organization, and your leadership and effective communication skills will be just as valuable as your ability to delve into challenging technical problems to arrive at simple and scalable solutions. • You will collaborate with the stakeholders to inform our IAM technical vision. • You will help lead the team through complex product and technical roadmaps, guiding them to consistently successful outcomes. • You will champion the quality of service for our access control and data planes, ensuring our team’s ongoing operational excellence is at the forefront of everything we deliver. • You will work to improve the processes, systems, and tools we use to deliver quality products, champion ideas that matter, and hold the team accountable. What you’ll bring We’re looking for a deeply technical, creative, collaborative, pragmatic, highly motivated, and inquisitive leader to join our team in building great software. If you love solving hard problems, delivering and sustaining high-quality software, and confidently guiding your peers to learn from and teach each other, we’d love to talk with you! The minimum qualifications for this role include: • 7 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 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 teams 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 Agreements (SLAs) that ensure a world-class customer experience, as well as the SLOs and SLIs we use to proactively track our performance against our SLAs. • Collaborate regularly with product managers, product designers, engineers, and other product teams to deliver value to our users. • 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 an MVP and iterative milestones. • Proactively build relationships with members on other teams through active networking and community building. • Decompose work into small, similarly-sized units so that task-level estimation is trivial. • Become an active participant in code reviews and retrospectives, 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. • Work with your team to create and prioritize quarterly team goals. • Be the first line of defense against product outages and bugs while on support duty. Within 6 months, you will: • Design, create, and maintain access platform solutions that execute at internet scale in a cost effective manner. • Apply your expertise to enhance our existing use of monitoring and alerting tools, thereby ensuring we know about problems before our end users or other back-end teams reliant on our platform. • Identify technical debt and performance bottlenecks within our systems, come up with a plan to improve them, and release them to production. • Frequently partner with other engineers to iterate on our existing IAM technical strategy in service of our overall vision. • Lead technical design planning and facilitate peer review for new feature ideas. • Mentor engineers, helping them level up technically. • Author your career growth plan with your manager’s support and work towards it. Within 12 months, you will: • Be the go-to expert of your teams’ systems 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. • Have 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: • 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

Keywords: Sprout Social, Oak Park , Staff Software Engineer - Back End, Access, IT / Software / Systems , Schiller Park, Illinois