Overview

PHP is at the heart of Help Scout’s web app. It touches everything, and also powers our back-end administration app. Your work will empower over 7,000 businesses around the world to provide great customer service, and will support other senior engineers on your team.

Tools We Use

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

ABOUT THE ROLE

  • The engineering team currently has twenty-five people, nine of whom work on the PHP and JS powering the Help Scout web app. On a typical day you may help a customer with an issue, work on a new feature, update a third party integration or create back-end tools to support our growth team. On any given project, you will be communicating with internal APIs, integrating with 3rd party services, optimizing processes using Redis and RabbitMQ, and wrapping it all up in support of a Backbone/Marionette (and sometimes React) front end.
  • 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 test cases and tag your team for review (often over a video and screen-sharing session). 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.
  • 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.
  • Every 10 weeks, two PHP engineers from the team will work exclusively on either growth projects or support tool engineering. When you are on the growth rotation, you will work closely with the design team on internal tools or integrations, improvements to the onboarding process or other features aimed at customer growth. When you are on the support tool rotation you will work closely with the support team to improve their efficiency through tool building, automation and helping customers with our APIs.

REQUIREMENTS

About You

  • You are very experienced with modern PHP development practices and open source frameworks. You’ve worked on these sorts of projects at scale and feel confident solving complex problems.
  • You have created Backbone (or a similar framework) single page applications before and can write JavaScript from scratch to implement a feature. Marionette and/or React experience is a bonus, but not required. We can help you pick it up.
  • Your code is not only reliable and performant for customers, but can be read, maintained and understood easily by other engineers on your team. You can also speak and write in terms that non-geeks understand. Clear communication is super important in a remote culture like ours.
  • You believe in writing 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 understand that some things are too costly to automate and must be manually tested to get it right.
  • 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.
  • Retirement Plan/401K – 1% 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.
  • 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.