Senior Data Engineer

Sprout Social is looking for a Data Engineer to join our Data Foundations team. This team builds the internal data infrastructure, pipelines, and products that empower analytics, data science, and business stakeholders across Sprout. While our software engineers are focused on delivering customer-facing platform features, our data engineers specialize in ensuring data is reliable, well-modeled, and accessible to fuel smarter decisions and internal innovation.

Why join Sprout Social’s Data Engineering team?

Sprout Social empowers businesses worldwide to harness the immense potential of social media in today’s digital-first world. Processing over one billion social messages daily, our platform delivers insights and actionable intelligence to more than 30,000 brands. These insights guide strategic decisions, drive growth, and foster deeper connections with customers.

Our Data Foundations team plays a critical role in this by enabling Sprout’s internal stakeholders—analytics, product, finance, sales, and beyond—to work with trustworthy, scalable, and reusable data. You’ll be helping build the pipelines, curated datasets, and data products that unlock value across the business and extend Sprout’s data-driven culture.

What you’ll do

• Implement ELT with managed connectors and/or open-source ingestion; codify transformations with frameworks that bring testing, CI/CD, and data contracts to analytics code.

• Create robust data ingest from both common and custom sources; design resilient models that serve analytics, experimentation, and operations.

• Partner with product and business stakeholders to define clear metrics and a semantic layer.

• Implement best practices in schema design, data modeling, and metadata management.

• Own and evolve internal data infrastructure for quality, monitoring, and discoverability.

• Provide pragmatic analyst and data science support (SQL debugging, orchestration bootstraps, troubleshooting) to unblock teams while the function scales.

• Mentor Sprout’s Data Eng team members and help in the hiring process.

• Partner with software engineering teams where application data intersects with internal pipelines—ensuring business-critical data is clean, structured, and usable.

What you’ll bring

We’re looking for a data engineer with a strong foundation in data infrastructure and a passion for enabling others to succeed through high-quality data.

The minimum qualifications for this role include:

• 5+ years of professional experience in data engineering or at least 5 years of hands-on experience building, deploying, and maintaining production-grade data infrastructure and pipelines.
• Advanced/Expert level in SQL (e.g. MySQL, PostgreSQL) and data modeling; Proven experience modeling across a diversity of business domains. Proficiency in Python.
• Working familiarity with ELT + transformation frameworks (e.g., dbt) and with orchestrators (e.g., Airflow, dbt.).
• Experience building internal data products (curated datasets, semantic layers, or reusable modeling frameworks).
• Pragmatic engineering habits: testing, version control, PR reviews, incident management, incident CI/CD, documentation, and observability for data.
• Built transformations with dbt (or similar) and managed semantic layers/metrics for BI (Tableau, Hex, Looker).
• Demonstrated experience collaborating with stakeholders from functions such as Product, Analytics, or Finance to gather requirements, define project scope, and deliver data solutions.

Preferred qualifications for this role include:

• Understanding of data quality frameworks, testing, and monitoring practices.
• Familiarity with event-driven or streaming frameworks (Kafka or NSQ, Kinesis, Pub/Sub).
• Exposure to cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and cost optimization for data platforms.

How you’ll grow

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

• Complete Sprout’s New Hire onboarding program and meet peers across Data Foundations, Data Science, Engineering.

• Learn the team’s existing data stack, pipelines, and modeling frameworks.

• Shadow teammates to understand how internal stakeholders use curated datasets today.

• Partner with your manager to scope your first pipeline or modeling task to own.

Within 3-6 months, you’ll start hitting your stride by:

• Delivering your first production-ready pipeline, dataset, or internal data product.

• Collaborating with analysts and data scientists on requirements for reusable modeling layers.

• Gaining deeper familiarity with Sprout’s data warehouse(s) and orchestration environment—and starting to suggest improvements.

• Audit our existing deployment procedures.

• Add data sources to our production data warehouse.

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

• Taking technical ownership of a set of pipelines or data products relied on by stakeholders across the business.

• Identify technical debt and performance bottlenecks within our systems, come up with a plan to improve the code, and get it pushed to production.

• Acting as a mentor to newer members of the Data Foundations team while continuing to grow your own expertise.

• Helping shape the team’s roadmap and long-term data foundations strategy.

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 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. You can confirm the pay zone for your specific location with your recruiter during your interview process. For this role, our current base pay ranges for new hires in each zone are:

• Zone 1 (New York, California, Washington): $162,448 (min), $203,060 (mid), $243,672 (max) USD annually

• Zone 2 (All other US states): $147,700 (min), $184,600 (mid), $221,500 (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 require a reasonable accommodation for any part of the interview process or to submit your application, please email us at [email protected]. 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). 

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 (3) Pay Transparency Statement. 

Additionally, Sprout Social participates in the E-Verify program in certain locations, as required by law. 

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