We are looking to hire someone who relishes designing and building systems and services that can manage large data sets (billions and beyond) with a high transaction volume that are scaling constantly to meet customer demand. The ideal person takes pride in building coherent and usable interfaces making it easy to use and operate on data. This role would allow you to take on on challenging problems, choose the right tools for the job and build elegant, scalable solutions. Your work as an experienced Java engineer will empower over 9,000 businesses around the world to provide great customer service, and will support the other senior engineers on your team.
We leverage Solr for several tools at Help Scout. Knowledge or even expertise in Solr is desired. However, as our data needs grow we look beyond search and towards Big Data solutions. We are seeking someone who can join the team and help us solve all kinds of data processing and analysis problems.
Currently at Help Scout
- We develop in Java, Kotlin, JavaScript and PHP
- We leverage AWS, RabbitMQ, Aurora MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Apache Solr
- We also use Slack, Jira, Trello, Github, Jenkins
About the role
- You will be the fourth member of our search and data services team, collaborating 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 testing and documentation.
- 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 own some of our large, upcoming challenges and collaborate with your team on all of these: 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.
- Our engineering team is over 40 people, more than half the company. As part of the search and data team you will 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. You will participate in making architectural discussion.
- We work in using iterative software approach, communicate mostly via Slack and are committed to remote, agile development. When you are ready, you’ll create and send a pull request with tests and tag your team for review - using video and screen-sharing as needed. Your development builds can be easily tested on environments that closely match production. You’ll work autonomously for the most part and we trust you to get work done when/where you can be productive.
- 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.
- Everything is secondary to the 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 product people that challenge you to get better every day. The founders are technical and committed to creating a magical experience for customers. You'll deploy work that moves the needle for businesses around the world.
- To ensure sufficient overlap with your teammates, we're looking for candidates that live in UTC+3 (Eastern Europe) and UTC-7 (as far as San Francisco) time zones.
About you
- You became an engineer because you like writing software that helps people.
- You bring a level of Java-specific expertise that will help us craft an outstanding experience for customers and fellow developers.
- You have experience building information systems and data processing platforms.
- You are skilled in the modern tooling that is used in data processing and retrieval domain. Big Data, Streaming Pipelines, Data Grids and Data Lakes are not just buzzwords to you.
- You are excited about JVM ecosystem. We also like Kotlin here.
- You are a skilled and passionate engineer who is friendly, collaborative, and supportive.
- You value personal growth and constructive feedback.
- You demonstrate an empathetic, organized and collaborative communication style with fellow engineers and non-engineering stakeholders.
- You will consider how your work impacts others, and demonstrate thoughtful, flexible approaches to mentoring and guiding technical decisions.
- Your code is not only a pleasure for customers to use, but for other engineers to read and understand easily.
Benefits
Competitive Salary - We pay at or above market salary in most cases and evaluate a lot of research to make sure everyone is paid well. The formula we use to calculate all salaries is public to employees and is improved upon regularly.
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 trust you.
Sabbatical - After you've been at Help Scout for 4 years, you get a month of paid vacation plus $2500 to spend towards travel, learning, projects or however you'd like to spend that time.
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
Great tools - Each employee will be provided with a Mac laptop and 27'' display (or equivalent equipment of choice). We’ll also purchase any additional software or hardware you need.
Home office stipend - Every new hire gets $1000 USD to furnish their home office, and 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 80 people in 40+ cities around the world, all with a passion for excellence in their craft. We come from diverse backgrounds and are united by an enthusiasm for great products and delightful customer experiences.
Since launching in April of 2011, Help Scout now powers 9,000+ support teams in over 140 countries. Our
software is used and trusted by businesses of every shape and size.
Designed to go the distance
Our mission is to foster the world’s customer-centric businesses by providing tools that serve customers in the most human, helpful way. While growth is important, team and values are paramount. We’re always striving to do impactful work we’re proud of in lieu of chasing overnight success.
We’re builders without borders
Our entire team is free to work remotely from wherever they choose. We overcome remote challenges through transparency, trust, and video conferencing. The reward is worth the effort—we’ll take talent, skill, and diverse perspectives over local geography any day.
Above all, we want Help Scout to be a place where passionate people can do their very best work. You won’t find any ping-pong tables or kegerators here. Instead, you’ll be surrounded by driven, supportive teammates who will push you to be better. We take work/life harmony seriously, too, as we want every career at Help Scout to be a long and satisfying one.
Diversity & Inclusion
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.