Help Scout - Sr. Software Engineer, Platform

• We develop in Kotlin, Java, JavaScript, and PHP. • Kotlin • We leverage Elasticsearch, ClickHouse, Kafka, Flink, RabbitMQ, MySQL, and PostgreSQL. We’re also in the process of migrating parts of our search infrastructure from Solr to Elasticsearch. • We leverage AI when it’s helpful to improve our productivity. • We are heavy users of the AWS ecosystem. • We also use Slack, GitHub, and Linear. • You will join the Search and Data Services team, working on the next generation of our large-scale search and reporting service and its associated infrastructure. • Search and Data Services • You will play a key role in evolving our systems to reliably scale 10x beyond today’s load. This includes building a streaming data reports pipeline and improving search relevancy, data indexing, and cost control for our high-throughput, event-driven system. • In your day-to-day work, you’ll build new features, improve existing systems, and evolve data pipelines, with a strong focus on scalability, testing, and maintainability. • You’ll be involved in the development lifecycle, from design and implementation decisions to testing strategies and backlog prioritization. You’ll also collaborate across engineering through code reviews and architectural discussions. • Your team provides engineering support when issues escalate beyond our support team. We’ll get you up to speed so you can help customers directly and use those insights to improve the product. • You’ll work alongside talented peers across Engineering, Product, and Design, including a leadership team who will challenge you to grow every day, all invested in building a truly delightful customer experience. • From time to time, you’ll partner with our Talent team to help interview and hire future teammates. • You are a passionate Backend Engineer (Java/Kotlin. Bonus points for full-stack experience!) who thrives on building scalable, maintainable, and easy-to-read software. You effectively balance business goals with customer needs to create solutions that stand the test of time and deliver a great experience for users and fellow developers alike. • You take real ownership of your work across the full development lifecycle, from early design and planning to deployment and monitoring in production. You care deeply about production readiness, including automation, reliability, resilience, monitoring, alerting, and logging. • You’re a collaborative and supportive team member who enjoys sharing knowledge, mentoring others, and contributing to technical decision-making. You see feedback - giving and receiving it - as a key part of growing both individually and as a team. • You communicate clearly and confidently in written and spoken English, enabling effective collaboration in a fully remote environment. • To support effective collaboration with our Europe-based team, this role requires at least 4 hours of overlap with Central European working hours. Candidates based in the US Eastern or Central Time zones are typically the best fit. • Company values • Happy to Help • Help is in our first name! We show up for each other — not out of obligation, but because we’re invested in the team’s collective success. We share knowledge freely, lead with generosity, and practice empathy with our teammates, customers, and community. • Craft over Convention • Our success relies on the quality and craft of the work we put into the world. The status quo simply won’t work. So we insist on narrow focus, sweating every detail, and relentless pursuit of customer delight. • Progress not Perfection • Achieving our true potential — collectively and individually — requires constant progress and forward momentum. By creating a culture of curiosity and openness, we aim to create a safe space for mistakes, the ability to identify them quickly, and use them to get better. • Own the Outcome • Own the outcome means taking full responsibility for the results of your work, decisions, and contributions. It reflects a mindset of accountability, proactiveness, and follow-through. If you “own the outcome,” you don’t just complete tasks, you ensure your work leads to meaningful results, and take initiative to solve problems rather than passing them along. • Read more about how we define, share, and live these values here.