Overview

JavaScript powers the magic behind Help Scout’s apps and services, bringing them to life with delightful interactions and dynamic real-time updates. Your work as an experienced JavaScript 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.

Tools We Use

  • js, Marionette.js, and React
  • Jasmine and Nightwatch.js
  • PHP
  • Pusher
  • RabbitMQ
  • Java (APIs)
  • MySQL and MongoDB

About the Role

  • The engineering team currently has twenty-seven people, 10 of whom work on the JS and PHP powering the Help Scout web app. On a typical day you may help a customer with an issue, work on a new feature, enhance our editor, update a third party integration or enhance our onboarding experience. On any given project, you will be using Backbone/Marionette (and React for newer components) to create delightful experiences that communicate with internal APIs, integrate with 3rd party services and are tested with Jasmine or Nightwatch.
  • Our engineering teams 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. We are investing heavily in continuous integration and delivery so your development branch 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.
  • You’ll work with three other full-time JavaScript engineers to maintain and improve JS standards and best practices across all of Help Scout. Our design team owns most of the html/css work and will help you make sure everything ends up being perfect.
  • 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.
  • Since the Help Scout web app depends on PHP passthroughs between the APIs and front-end, you’ll be writing some PHP. Experience with PHP and/or other object-oriented languages will be necessary for you to do excellent work.
  • Everything is secondary to thecustomer 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.
  • You can work anywhere in the world as long as you have 4+ hours of overlap time with Boston, MA (9AM – 6PM ET).

About you

  • You enjoy building Backbone apps and have an excellent understanding of the best practices. Marionette experience is a bonus but not required. You won’t have trouble picking it up.
  • You are very experienced with modern JS development practices and frameworks including ES6 and React. You’ve worked on JS projects at scale and feel confident solving complex problems.
  • You are experienced with JS/CSS code quality tools, preprocessors and build tools.
  • Your code and interactions are not only reliable and smooth across current browsers, but they can also be read, maintained and understood easily by other engineers on your team. You are an excellent communicator who can write and speak with empathy for our customers and team. Clear communication is super important in a remote culture like ours.
  • You believe in writing thorough unit and integration tests and have at least tried TDD. You like owning the quality of the code you write — QA doesn’t mean throwing it over the wall for someone else to test.
  • You believe remote teams are the future of work, or are at least excited about the idea. You have experience working with remote teams or can adjust your work/management style to be remote-friendly.

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– Work from our office in Boston or anywhere else, provided you have 4 hours of overlap with the team. We’ll even 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 Harvard Pilgrim HMO or PPO policies.
  • 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.
  • International Benefit Stipend– 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.
  • 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– 1% Retirement Plan matching for both US and International Employees
  • Personal development stipend– Up to $1,800 per year to improve your craft
  • Great tools– Each employee receives a Mac laptop and 27” display (or equivalent). We’ll also purchase any of the software or hardware you need as well as high-end furniture to get your home office started
  • Complete transparency– Everyone has full access to business metrics and financial information about the company.

About Help Scout

Help Scout is a remote team with employees in many states and seven countries (eight people in the Boston office). 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. There is no sales team. 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.