Senior Java Engineer

As a member of our Communications team building APIs in Kotlin and Java, you’ll be creating the foundations upon which our Beacon and Messages products are built. These products empower over 11,000 companies around the world to deliver world class support to their customers.

The ideal engineer for this position enjoys building and collaborating on elegant solutions. You relish the opportunity to tackle both customer and product orientated problems.

Currently at Help Scout:

We develop in Java, Kotlin, JavaScript and PHP

We leverage AWS, Redis, RabbitMQ, Aurora MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB

We also use Slack, Jira, Github, Jenkins, Docker, Drone

About the role:

• You will be working as a member of a small cross-functional team, responsible for expanding our APIs to support our Beacon and Messages products. These APIs serve tens of millions of requests per day. You’ll be working alongside another JVM Engineer, as well as JavaScript and PHP Engineers, and a product manager and designer.
• The engineering team is made up of 50 people spread across several small, cross-functional teams. These teams contain all the back-end and front-end talent to deliver exciting new 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.
• We work using an iterative software approach, communicate mostly via Slack and are committed to remote, agile development.
• 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.
• In order to ensure enough team overlap, you're located anywhere between Mountain Time and Central European 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 deliver an outstanding experience for customers and fellow developers.
• You have experience collaborating with other engineers, product, and design folks to craft relevant, customer-focused solutions, that serve high volumes of traffic.
• You are excited about the JVM ecosystem.
• You are a skilled, passionate, and humble engineer who is friendly, collaborative, and supportive. You want to be challenged by the work and not the workload. You are willing to ask for help when necessary and unafraid to say,“I don’t know.” At the same time, you have the confidence to take on complex and challenging problems.
• You value personal growth and constructive feedback. Believing that“a rising tide lifts all ships,” you make everyone around you better sharing what you have learned and looking for ways to improve both yourself and the team.
• You demonstrate an empathetic, organized and collaborative communication style with fellow engineers and non-engineering stakeholders. Clear communication is super important in a remote culture like ours.
• 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. When working in the codebase, you leave things better than you found them.
• 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 - 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
• 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 110 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.