PHP is at the heart of Help Scout’s web app. It touches nearly everything, and also powers our back-end administration application. Your work will empower over 8,000 businesses around the world to provide great customer service, and will support other senior engineers on your team.
Tools we use
- PHP 7.x
- Lumen, Laravel, and Symfony
- Backbone.js, Marionette.js, and React.js
- Node.js
- RabbitMQ
- Redis
- Pusher
- Java(APIs)
- MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB
About the role
- The engineering team currently has thirty-four talented engineers. You will be working on one of the Help Scout web app teams, which currently has 6 engineers (PHP, JavaScript). On a typical day you may help a customer with an issue, work on a new feature, create a third party integration or enhance 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, RabbitMQ, various AWS services, and wrapping it all up in support of a Backbone/Marionette or 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 have invested heavily in local Docker development and cloud-based continuous integration and delivery so you can get setup fast and 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 top-notch 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.
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 view “best practices” as a starting point for critical thinking, rather than a dogma to follow.
- You have created a single page application using Backbone (or a similar framework) 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. The Zen of Python resonates with you for any language.
- 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 take pride in your work and ownership of the solutions you build. When a team member or customer is in need, you feel a sense of urgency to understand their pain and thoughtfully help.
- You are curious and constantly learning. 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 are a humble professional who wants 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 are proactive about solving problems and improving things. You take the initiative to build tools and processes that will help everyone. When working in the codebase, you leave things better than you found them.
- You are an excellent communicator who can write and speak with empathy for our customers and team. You can easily communicate complex ideas to both technical and non-technical audiences. Clear communication is super important in a remote culture like ours.
- 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.
- You can work anywhere in the world as long as you have 4+ hours of overlap time with Boston, MA (9AM- 6PM ET).
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- 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. You can work anywhere in the world as long as you have 4+ hours of overlap time with Boston, MA (9AM- 6PM ET).
- 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.
- 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.
- Complete transparency- Everyone has full access to business metrics and financial information about the company.
About Us
Help Scout is made by roughly 70 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 8,000+ 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.