Overview

Your Impact

The ideal engineer for this position loves building RESTful APIs and other web services at scale. You relish the opportunity to take on a challenging problem, choose the right tool for the job and build an elegant, scalable solution. Your work as an experienced Java engineer will empower over 8,000 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 and are looking for someone that can improve and maintain our implementation as we grow.

Tools We Use

  • Apache Solr, Java, Spring, Play, MySQL, AWS, Hibernate
  • Slack, Trello, Github, Sentry, Postman Pro, Jenkins

About the Role

  • You will join our two-person search team in owning the enhancement of the data quality and data processing on our large-scale search platform. On a daily basis, you’ll work on improving existing code, adding new functionality and API endpoints all with a focus on testing and documentation.
  • We are constantly improving our search and reporting capabilities and you will work on new challenging projects such as streamlining the Reports infrastructure, improving search relevancy and solving large scale data problems.
  • Our engineering team is currently thirty people, just over half the company. As part of our eight-person Java team you will be involved in the decisions made regarding implementation, testing, and backlog prioritization.
  • We work in two-week iterations, 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.

REQUIREMENTS
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 are a skilled and passionate Java 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.

About Us

  • Help Scout is a remote first team team with employees across the globe. We optimize the team for excellence over geography and overcome remote challenges through transparency, trust, and video conferencing.
  • We’re a customer-driven company and always will be. Everything follows the customer experience, no exceptions. Everyone at Help Scout is aligned in their motivation to create content that adds value and build a product that is a pleasure for businesses to use.
  • Our company is growing quickly and has aspirations of helping millions of people around the world. Accomplishing our goals will present countless challenges and require you to excel in every aspect of the position. It’s super hard, but the people we’re looking for love tackling hard problems.
  • This is not the typical startup “rocketship”. We’ll never compromise customers or the experience in favor of growth. Our purpose is to build a profitable company that small businesses love and sustain it for the long term. There are no kegerators, playgrounds or Xboxes. Instead, we’d prefer employees to have a sustainable work/life balance and for their career at Help Scout to be a long one.

We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. 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.

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.
  • Work anywhere – Provided you have 4 hours of overlap with the team. We’ll fly you to Boston for a week of new employee on-boarding and buy your home office furniture or help you pay for a co-working space.
  • 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, you’ll receive a monthly stipend that goes towards covering medical insurance, long and short-term disability, and accountant 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.
  • Paid parental leave, including adoption- 12 weeks if you have or adopt a baby, 4 weeks if your partner has a baby.
  • 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.
  • Complete transparency – Everyone has full access to business metrics and financial information about the company.