Senior ML Engineer / AI Ops Lead

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 engagement functionality, customer care solutions, influencer marketing, connected workflows, and business intelligence. We're actively weaving AI throughout our products to drive our business’s growth trajectory.

What you’ll do

• Build and maintain infrastructure using AWS, Terraform, and Kubernetes to support AI/ML at scale, including Generative AI applications. 
• Manage the end-to-end lifecycle of machine learning models, ensuring observability and tooling support both scale and speed.
• Execute at scale while staying nimble enough to keep up with new capabilities being offered by social network APIs.
• Improve processes and champion ideas that matter while holding the team accountable to high code quality and engineering standards.
• Support our AI/ML Scientists by developing tooling to streamline model development and deployment.

What you’ll bring

We’re looking for a creative, collaborative, pragmatic, highly motivated, and impact oriented technical leader to join our team in building great software. If you can solve hard problems, deliver quality server-side software, and confidently guide your peers to learn from and teach each other, we’d love to talk with you!

The minimum qualifications for this role include:

• 5+ years of experience developing and supporting AI/ML software in a production environment.
• 5+ years of experience programming in object-oriented languages such as Java, Python, or C++.
• Impact-oriented mindset with an interest in stability at scale and a willingness to engage in feature development.

Preferred qualifications for this role include experience:

• 3+ years of experience developing and supporting scalable, distributed backend services.
• 3+ years of experience building and supporting GPU-heavy services.
• 1+ years of experience with LLMs / Generative AI, including managing their unique costs, constraints, and observability challenges.
• 1+ years of experience with Infrastructure-as-Code (Terraform) and container orchestration (Kubernetes) within AWS environments.

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 team's current Mission, Goals, and Objectives along with future product roadmaps.
• Become familiar with the team’s existing deployment patterns and the ML Ops tooling ecosystem.

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

• Decomposing work into small, similarly sized units and working with your squad to prioritize quarterly team goals.
• Setting up initial software for model deployment and monitoring of ML models.Partnering with the Infrastructure team to deploy an existing ML model in Kubernetes.Acting as the domain owner for new projects and writing necessary design documents.

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

• Rolling out monitoring and alerting tools to identify problems before they affect users.
• Helping deploy new ML models processing hundreds of millions of messages a day.
• Identifying technical debt and performance bottlenecks, and executing plans to improve the code.
• Collaborating effectively across the organization to ensure big-picture alignment.

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

• Becoming the go-to expert of ML Ops at Sprout.
• Developing repeatable deployment patterns for data scientists to train, deploy, and evaluate batch, REST, and event-based ML services.
• Owning cross-organizational projects and mentoring junior engineers to help them level up technically.
• Surprising us! Use your unique ideas and abilities to change your team in beneficial ways.

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:

• 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.
• Retirement Savings: 401(k) plan with a 50% company match on your first 6% of contributions (a 3% total match).
• Financial Security: 100% employer-paid Life and Disability insurance for your peace of mind.
• Flexible Paid Time Off: A flexible PTO policy, supplemented with additional company-wide Rest & Recharge days throughout the year.
• Paid Parental Leave: Up to 16 weeks of paid leave for new parents to support you in expanding your family.
• Annual Lifestyle Stipend: A $1,000 USD annual Lifestyle Spending Account to spend on your physical, mental, and financial well-being.
• Work From Home Support: A one-time $550 USD stipend to set up your home office, plus a monthly $50 USD stipend for internet.
• Giving Back: 16 hours of paid volunteer time annually, plus a $100 annual match for your charitable donations.
• Additional Financial Perks: Access to pre-tax commuter benefits, subsidized child/eldercare (Care.com), discounted pet insurance (Figo), and no-cost personalized financial wellness support through Your Money Line.

*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.

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): $149,300 - $205,260 USD annually
• Zone 2 (All other US states): $135,700- $186,560 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 here to help you to understand our total rewards package.

Sprout Social is proud to be an Equal Opportunity 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. Because Sprout Social is a federal contractor, we affirmatively recruit individuals with a disability and protected veterans. 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 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). 

For more information about our commitment to equal employment opportunity, please click here (1) Equal Opportunity Employment Poster and (2) Sprout Social's Affirmative Action Statement. 

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

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