Senior Software Engineer, (AI)

Description

Sprout Social empowers businesses worldwide to harness the immense power and opportunity of social media in today’s digital-first world. Processing over one billion social messages daily, our platform serves up essential insights and actionable information to over 30,000 brands, informing strategic decisions that drive business growth and innovation, and fostering deeper, authentic connections to their end customers. Our full suite of social media management solutions includes comprehensive publishing and reporting functionality, customer care solutions, influencer marketing, connected workflows, business intelligence, and proprietary agentic AI. 

What you’ll do

• Ensure we build, scale, ship, and monitor our AI and Agent platforms reliably, leveraging technologies such as Java, Python, MySQL, OpenSearch, Redis, AWS, and Kubernetes.
• Integrate generative AI and agentic AI across Sprout’s existing ecosystem and infrastructure, helping define and build frameworks for platform AI enablement. 
• Build with AI and agentic AI in your own work, using tools such as Claude Code. 
• Influence and contribute to technical roadmaps by researching and prototyping emerging AI technologies, frameworks, and state of the art methods.
• Partner with product managers, designers, applied AI/ML scientists, and other engineers to define requirements and complete feature work.
• Uphold project quality and planning through meeting deadlines, breaking down work, and ensuring proper testing and monitoring.
• Contribute to the team’s growth through mentorship, knowledge sharing, and providing feedback on PRs and technical designs.

What you’ll bring

We’re looking for an experienced and impact oriented engineer to join our team in building great software. If you enjoy working on cutting edge and rapidly changing technology, thinking through secure system design, and want to accelerate building generative AI and Agentic AI features, we’d love to talk with you! 

The minimum qualifications for this role include:

• 4+ years of experience designing, developing, and supporting production-grade backend distributed systems or platform services at scale in languages such as Java or Python. 
• 3+ years of experience improving architectural patterns of large-scale software applications. 
• 1+ years of experience driving root-cause analysis and resolving complex architectural and performance bottlenecks across the entire stack. 

Preferred qualifications for this role include:

• 1+ years of experience architecting high-throughput, cost-optimized, and scalable systems that power AI-enabled features.
• 1+ years of experience implementing and leveraging LLM and agent orchestration frameworks (e.g., LangChain4j, LangGraph, CrewAI).

Bonus: 

• Experience designing and implementing secure, extensible java MCP architectures.
• Experience supporting server-driven UI, with the ability to contribute across both platform and web. 

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.
• Acclimating to the team's current Mission, Goals, and Objectives along with future product roadmaps.
• Deploying and making changes to our production systems.
• Collaborating regularly with the development team 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:

• Learning, updating, and improving Sprout’s existing AI platform services and frameworks.
• Being the first line of defense against product outages and bugs while on support duty.
• Working with your dev team to come up with the MVPs of new features.
  
  

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

• Being “point person” on a project, including writing design documents, coordinating dependencies, and acting as domain owner.
• Collaborating with product managers, applied AI/ML scientists, and web-engineers to identify opportunities for improving the scalability, reliability, latency, and cost of Sprout’s AI systems. 
• Staying up to date with generative AI, agentic AI, and MCP related technologies and leveraging that knowledge to improve and influence our technical roadmap.
  
  

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

• Shipping, and making it easier to ship and support, AI Agents and generative AI solutions at Sprout. 
• Owning cross-organizational projects and mentoring other engineers to help them grow.
• Surprising us! Use your unique ideas and abilities to change your team in beneficial ways.
  
  

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.

Individual base pay is based on various factors, including whether you’re located in Zone 1 or Zone 2, as well as relevant experience and skills. In the United States, we have two geographic pay zones. For this role, the expected base pay ranges for new hires are:

• Zone 1 (New York, California, Washington): $164,200 - $220,00 USD annually
• Zone 2 (All other US states): $149,200 - $220,000 USD annually

The listed ranges represent earning potential in this position. 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