Sprout Social has partnered with UNCF to establish the Sprout Social UNCF Scholarship Program. This scholarship is focused on providing merit-based scholarships to college seniors who exemplify strong leadership abilities and demonstrate interest in computer science or software engineering. Scholarship recipients will receive the opportunity to apply and interview for a full-time role at Sprout Social that would start in the summer of 2023. Application materials will be shared with the scholarship Grantor.

1. Self-identify as African American/Black, and be a US citizen or permanent resident. 
2. Be enrolled as a full-time college senior for the 2022-2023 academic year.
3. Must be graduating with a bachelor’s degree in computer science, software engineering, or a related field in December 2022 or May 2023.
4. Have a minimum cumulative grade point average (GPA) of 3.0 on a 4.0 scale
5. Must permanently reside in one of the required states (listed on the right side of this page).

1. Applicants located in Chicago or Seattle, or able to work remotely from one of Sprout Social's approved states.
2. Applicants currently attending the Georgia Institute of Technology, Howard University, or North Carolina A&T State University.

1. An official current academic transcript.
2. A one-page resume that includes the applicant's activities, leadership, involvement, awards, and level of proficiency in different programming languages.

Additional Scholarship Information

1. UNCF will contact selected finalists’ institutions to verify their eligibility. Applicants who do not meet all listed eligibility and application requirements should not apply.
2. Application materials will not be accepted via email at any time.
3. Unless specified above, scholarship funds will be disbursed directly to the recipient’s institution.
4. For login, password, or other account issues, please contact UNCF customer support Monday-Friday from 9am-5pm EST at 202-810-0258 or scholarships@uncf.org.
5. Scholarship decisions will be emailed to applicants within 8 weeks of the application deadline. 
6. Career opportunities and notifications will be managed by Sprout Social.
7. Questions about this scholarship that have not been answered above may be submitted to Brandi Williams at brandi.williams@uncf.org.

Code quality is an essential ingredient to keeping our platform flexible and rapidly reacting to changes in the market and social media networks. We use a variety of technologies, like Java, Python, MySQL, Cassandra, Hadoop, Elasticsearch, NSQ, Docker, and Kubernetes, to ensure our systems execute at scale, and React and Redux to build intuitive user experiences.

In our engineering program for new graduates, you’ll be embedded as a member of our cross-functional engineering teams in an Agile development environment, and have the opportunity to try different engineering disciplines (back-end, front-end, site reliability engineering, or mobile). Our engineers work in tandem with product designers and product managers to drive our product initiatives to successful outcomes. Our small teams (7-10 people) provide a friendly and supportive atmosphere to learn while shipping production software.

At Sprout, we'll help you grow your skills and your career through onboarding, mentorship, and the opportunity to pair with more senior engineers.  You’ll have the opportunity to work with a diverse group of individuals, propose product and technical changes, and deliver best-in-class software. If you’re passionate about solving complex problems and building large scale applications using cutting edge technologies, we’d love to talk with you!

Qualifications

These are the minimum qualifications that our hiring team is looking for in this role:

1. Expected bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field in December 2022 or Spring 2023

Additionally, these are the preferred qualifications that would indicate a particularly strong candidate:

1. Experience with some of the technologies and languages within our stack: Java, Python, Javascript
2. Previous software engineering internship experience

Within 1 month, you will:

1. Experience Sprout’s in-depth onboarding, covering everything from our company mission and values, hearing directly from executives and founders, to deep training on our products and the value that Sprout delivers to our customers.
2. Make a plan with your manager to set initial priorities, align on expectations for your role, plant goalposts for your career, and learn about Sprout’s approach to engineering.
3. Learn how code is deployed to our end users through collaboration with engineers on your team.
4. Collaborate regularly with your product manager, product designer and fellow engineers to deliver value to our users.
5. Get regular team feedback on your code through code reviews.
6. Deliver business value by shipping your first code change with active pairing/mentoring from your teammates.

Within 3 months, you will:

1. Focus on code quality with meaningful test coverage and legibility.
2. Have a firm understanding of the team’s roadmap and the team’s Agile processes.
3. Contribute to our Agile culture of continuous improvement through retrospective meetings and experimentation-oriented thinking.
4. Build connections with members from other teams through active networking and community building
5. Attend technical design meetings with your teammates to walk through new feature ideas.
6. Maintain and build upon systems that handle hundreds of thousands of messages a day.
7. Build your engineering skills by attending in-house presentations, workshops, and training sessions.

Within 6 months, you will:

1. Independently own and deliver stories with peer consultation given user acceptance criteria and visual mockups.
2. Work with your product manager and fellow engineers to create and prioritize quarterly team goals.
3. Collaborate with product managers, product designers, and engineers to come up with the MVPs of new features.
4. Have your first performance conversation with your manager, where you’ll discuss your accomplishments in your role and work together to build goals for your professional growth.

Within 12 months, you will:

1. Have a track record of owning and delivering small-to-medium features on time, from implementation to testing to final delivery.
2. Integrate and use monitoring and alerting tools to know about problems before our users.
3. Participate in architecture discussions with senior team members.
4. Understand trade-offs that exist with engineering solutions, knowing that solutions can favor faster delivery with less strict technical requirements or solutions can favor future technical maintainability with delayed delivery of customer value.
5. Contribute to technical initiatives that improve the health of the team’s systems.
6. Understand how the team uses frameworks and software dependencies and help keep them up to date
7. Surprise us! Use your unique ideas and abilities to change your team in beneficial ways that we haven’t even considered yet.

Applicants contacted by Sprout Social about this career opportunity may contact uncf@sproutsocial.com with any questions.