This is a full-time, remote position.

At this time, we are only able to hire in the following countries: United States, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Netherlands, Norway, Poland, United Kingdom.

Join the Search and Data Services team at Help Scout! Your work on this team will power critical search capabilities that our customers depend on every day. You’d manage large, frequently changing data-sets with thousands of transactions per second!

Our ideal candidate takes pride in building coherent and usable interfaces, choosing the right tools for the job and creating elegant, scalable solutions. Your work as an experienced JVM Engineer will empower over 12,000 businesses around the world to provide excellent customer service and will support the other senior engineers on your team.

We leverage Ignite, Solr and Lucene for several tools at Help Scout, but knowledge or even expertise in these tools is not required. It is a nice bonus, though.

Currently at Help Scout

• We develop in Java, Kotlin, JavaScript and PHP

• We leverage Solr, Lucene, Ignite, Kafka, RabbitMQ, MySQL, PostgreSQL and MongoDB

• We are heavy users of the AWS ecosystem

• We also use Slack, Jira, Github, and Drone CI

About the role

• Engineering at Help Scout is about 50 people, around half of the company, and you will join our Search and Data Services team. You'll collaborate on the next generation of our large-scale search and reporting service and associated infrastructure.

• On a daily basis, you'll work on adding new functionality, improving existing code, and API endpoints while maintaining focus on scalability, testing and documentation.

• You will play a key role in our journey towards a more holistic adoption of DevOps practices.

• We currently index millions of search and report events every day, and at peak hours, our API handles tens of thousands of transactions a minute. You will play a key role in evolving our services to handle 10x that.

• You will collaborate with the team on building a streaming data reports pipeline, reworking how we index data and retrieve data to scale while controlling infrastructure costs, and significantly improving our search relevancy and customer-facing reporting capabilities.

• On a daily basis, you'll work on new functionality, and be involved in the decisions made regarding implementation, testing, and backlog prioritization. You will collaborate with the rest of the engineering team through code reviews and participate in making architectural decisions.

• Our teams are organized around Lean Flow, data-informed, and human-centered design with shared mission to build delightful software that solves our customers greatest needs.

• Your team performs engineering support when a question can't be answered by our in-house support team and passes triage. We'll get you up-to-speed with engineering support so you can help our customers and improve the product along the way.

• We are committed to creating and maintaining an excellent customer experience. We expect you to have a keen sense of how your code will impact the experience in terms of performance, security and usability.

• You’ll be working with people that challenge you to grow every day, including leaders in Design and Product. The founders and leadership team are technical and committed to creating a magical experience for our customers.

• You will periodically partner with our Talent team to help us hire our future team members.
• Salary: We have an internal transparent salary matrix for each team. For this role, our bands are between $156,000 to 182,000 USD. Read more about how we approach compensation here!

About you

• You became an engineer because you like writing software that helps people. Your code is not only a pleasure for customers to use, but for other engineers to read and understand easily.

• You are a great communicator and have an excellent command of written and spoken English. As a remote company, we rely on clear communication for collaboration and execution.

• You are a skilled and passionate engineer who is friendly, collaborative, and supportive.

• You take ownership of your creation seriously and actively participate in each step of the development lifecycle.

• You understand the need to balance business and customer needs with agile delivery of tightly scoped, scalable code that stands the test of time.

• You bring a level of Java-specific expertise that will help us craft an outstanding experience for customers and fellow developers. You enjoy working with the JVM and will be comfortable using or learning Kotlin.

• You are no stranger to build and deployment automation.

• Your typical production readiness checklist covers things like redundancy, resiliency, monitoring, alerting and logging.

• You value giving and receiving feedback just as much as we do. You see it as an opportunity for personal and career growth.

• You consider how your work impacts others and demonstrate thoughtful, flexible approaches to mentoring and guiding technical decisions.

• In order to ensure enough team overlap, you are located anywhere between Mountain Time and Central European Time zones.

Benefits

Competitive salary - Our salary formula is public to all employees (but doesn't divulge your specific salary) and we update it at least once per year. Your salary is the same no matter where you live. Our goal is to pay at or above the market rate of a US-based tech hub like Boston or Seattle.

Health and dental insurance - We cover you and your family's health/dental insurance 100%. If you are based in the US, we'll cover you on our Aetna policy. If you're based outside the US, we'll reimburse your out-of-pocket health and dental insurance costs.

Long-term/short-term disability insurance & life insurance - we cover 100% of the premiums for LT/ST disability insurance and base life insurance. You also have the option to purchase supplementary life insurance through our provider (currently US only).

Flexible vacation - Take time off when you need it! We recommend 3-4 weeks in addition to public holidays, but there are no firm rules. We trust you.

Sabbatical - After you've been at Help Scout for 4 years, you get a month of paid vacation (in addition to regular vacation) and $2,500 to spend towards travel, learning, projects or anything else during your time off. Read about what our CEO did.

Paid parental leave, including adoption - 12 weeks of paid leave for all new parents.

401k with 1% match- via Betterment for Business (currently US only)

Personal Development stipend - Up to $1,800 per year to improve your craft

Bonuses - everyone is eligible to receive a quarterly bonus up to 8% based on shared company revenue goals.

Set you up for success — we’ll get every new teammate a Mac laptop or equivalent of their choice, and provide a $1500 stipend so you can feel ready to work from home. We also cover up to $350 USD per month if you'd like to rent a co-working desk somewhere.

Complete transparency - Everyone has full access to business metrics and financial information about the company.

About Us

Help Scout is made by roughly 150 people in 80+ cities around the world, all with a passion for helping others. We come from diverse backgrounds and are united by an enthusiasm for great products and delightful customer experiences. Help Scout launched in 2011 and today we have more than 12,000 paying customers in 140+ countries.

Why Help Scout?

We're remote. It doesn’t matter if you’ve worked remotely before — we’ve been doing it for nearly a decade and are helping to write the playbook — we’re happy to show you the ropes. Most folks that get a taste of working in a "remote first" company have a hard time going back to the old way of doing things.

We’re passionate about diversity and inclusion. The data is abundantly clear about diverse teams being more successful, and we're dedicated to setting the team up for success. Today our leadership team is 62% women, and that's just the start. Here's our DEI Dashboard where you can see all of our team demographic data and read about our commitment to this work.

We're committed to SMBs for the long term. Help Scout is focused entirely on serving small and midsize businesses, typically up to 500 employees, because those companies view customer service differently. It's not a cost to be optimized, it's their most effective marketing tool and a key differentiator from the competition. We built Help Scout for companies that truly value being customer-centric (like us) and want a product that shares their values.

We're leaving the world better than we found it. Did you know Help Scout is a certified B Corporation, with a mission to give away at least 1% of our product through Help Scout for Good? Our company exists not just to help ourselves, but to invest in our team, our customers, our community, and our environment.

Our commitment to you

We are an equal opportunity employer and are committed to building a company that embraces and celebrates diversity and inclusion. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. We have read the studies and understand that diverse teams build better products, bring more perspective to the table, contribute to a company’s financial success and help foster a more inclusive environment for all employees, but the bottom line is that it's the right thing to do.