Manager, Engineering - Tooling

Description

Sprout Social is looking for an Engineering Manager to lead our Tooling team.

Why join Sprout’s Engineering team?

At Sprout, we believe great engineering organizations are built on exceptional developer experience. Our Tooling team creates the platforms, automation, and workflows that enable hundreds of engineers to build, test, deploy, and operate software safely and efficiently.

As the Engineering Manager for Tooling, you’ll lead a team responsible for improving developer productivity across the company. From modern Continuous Delivery and CI/CD platforms to AI-powered developer workflows, engineering observability, release automation, and internal developer tooling, your team’s work directly impacts every engineer at Sprout.

Work closely with Product Engineering teams to understand pain points and prioritize improvements that meaningfully increase developer velocity.

You’ll partner closely with engineering leaders across Infrastructure and Product Engineering to reduce friction, improve reliability, and enable teams to ship software faster with confidence.

What you’ll do

• Lead, coach, and develop a team of SRE’s focused on Developer Experience and Engineering Productivity.
• Partner with Engineering leadership to define the long-term vision for developer tooling across Sprout.
• Drive the evolution of our Continuous Delivery platform, deployment automation, and release workflows.
• Lead modernization efforts across our CI/CD ecosystem.
• Partner with Infrastructure and Security teams to build secure-by-default engineering workflows.
• Guide technical direction for internal platforms supporting software development, deployment, monitoring, and operational excellence.
• Foster engineering best practices around automation, reliability, testing, and operational maturity.
• Help teams improve software delivery performance using DORA metrics and engineering health indicators.
• Enable adoption of AI-assisted engineering workflows and autonomous development tooling.
• Work closely with Product Engineering teams to understand pain points and prioritize improvements that meaningfully increase developer velocity.
• Support strategic infrastructure initiatives including deployment platforms, release management, engineering observability, source control automation, and internal developer portals.
• Build an inclusive, collaborative engineering culture focused on continuous improvement.

Areas owned by the Tooling team

Examples of platforms and technologies owned or supported include:

• Continuous Delivery platform
• GitHub Actions
• Jenkins modernization
• Deployment automation
• Build and release pipelines
• Internal developer tooling
• Engineering AI platforms and autonomous agents
• Datadog developer integrations
• PagerDuty engineering integrations
• Package management and artifact repositories
• Source control automation
• Engineering productivity metrics
• Observability

What you’ll bring

We’re looking for a collaborative engineering leader who enjoys solving large scale engineering productivity challenges.

Minimum qualifications

• 3-5+ years managing software engineering teams
• 7+ years building and operating production software systems
• Experience leading cross-functional technical initiatives across multiple engineering organizations
• Experience designing and operating CI/CD systems and modern software delivery pipelines
• Experience with cloud-native platforms such as Kubernetes and AWS
• Experience improving engineering productivity through automation

Preferred qualifications

• Experience with GitHub Actions or similar CI/CD platforms
• Experience leading Developer Experience or Platform Engineering teams
• Experience with deployment orchestration and release automation
• Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code and platform automation
• Experience implementing software delivery metrics such as DORA
• Experience evaluating or implementing AI assisted software development workflows
• Experience with observability platforms such as Datadog, Sentry, Grafana, or OpenTelemetry
• Experience supporting internal engineering platforms used across large engineering organizations

How you’ll grow

Within 1 month

• Complete Sprout’s onboarding program.
• Meet your team, stakeholders, and partner engineering organizations.
• Learn our software delivery lifecycle, deployment platforms, and developer workflows.
• Build relationships with Product Engineering, Infrastructure, Security, and Engineering Leadership.
• Understand current priorities around Continuous Delivery, CI CD modernization, and developer productivity.

Within 3 months

• Begin leading quarterly planning with your team.
• Develop a roadmap for engineering productivity improvements.
• Understand key developer pain points and identify opportunities to reduce friction.
• Partner with Engineering leaders to prioritize platform investments.
• Contribute to technical planning and architecture discussions for internal developer platforms.
• Help drive adoption of engineering best practices across multiple product teams.

Within 6 months

• Successfully deliver several meaningful improvements to developer experience and software delivery.
• Coach engineers through career development, performance feedback, and technical growth.
• Drive measurable improvements in deployment speed, reliability, and engineering efficiency.
• Lead cross functional initiatives spanning Infrastructure and Product Engineering.
• Establish clear operational metrics for Tooling platform health and adoption.
• Help teams safely adopt new deployment capabilities and engineering workflows.

Within 12 months

• Establish the Tooling team as a trusted engineering platform organization.
• Deliver measurable improvements in developer productivity and software delivery performance.
• Build and execute a multi-quarter roadmap aligned with Engineering strategy.
• Partner with senior engineering leadership on long-term platform investments.
• Develop future technical leaders within the team.
• Champion continuous improvement across engineering through automation, standardization, and developer focused platform investments.
• Help shape the future of AI-enabled software development at Sprout.

Success in this role

Success is not measured by the number of features shipped by your own team. It is measured by the productivity, reliability, and satisfaction of every engineering team that relies on the platforms you build.

You’ll know you’re succeeding when:

Our Benefits Program

We’re proud to regularly be recognized for our team, product, and culture. We invest in our team with a comprehensive, competitive benefits program:

• Engineering teams deploy more frequently and with greater confidence.
• Developer friction decreases through automation and self-service platforms.
• Software delivery metrics improve across the organization.
• Developers adopt your platforms because they are intuitive and valuable.
• The Tooling team becomes a trusted strategic partner for engineering leaders.
• Engineers spend more time building customer value and less time managing infrastructure, tooling, and deployment complexity.
• Comprehensive Health & Wellness: Premium BCBSIL medical, dental (high/low plans), and vision (Eyemed) insurance for you and your eligible dependents.
• Premium Mental Health Support: Full, free access to Modern Health for you and your dependents, including coaching, therapy sessions, and digital wellness resources.