Platform Engineer Tech Lead

Job Description

This is a full-time, fully remote position. At this time we are only able to hire in the following countries: United States, Canada, Australia, Finland, Ireland, Netherlands, Poland, United Kingdom, Denmark, Germany, Norway. We’re working on expanding this list! As a member of our DevOps team, you will be at the heart of nearly every application, tool, and service at Help Scout. The work you do every day will reflect the team mission: Ensure uptime and security across all of our applications, while developing and supporting tools to enable developer bliss . To help us with our mission, we are seeking an experienced DevOps/Platform Engineer Tech Lead to join our team. You will have a direct impact on Help Scout’s success while helping more than 12,000 businesses around the world. While customers love our product , it means nothing if they can't access our services with great performance.

Technologies we use

• AWS, Linux(Ubuntu/CentOS, Bottlerocket), Terraform, Ansible, Git/Github, RabbitMQ, AWS Aurora MySQL & PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, Drone, Kubernetes, Argo, Docker/Compose, Datadog, PagerDuty, Kotlin, Go, Python, and PHP.

About the role

• European time zones are preferred, but not mandatory.
• You'll provide technical leadership for solution design, balancing short-term OKRs and the long-term technical strategy.
• You'll enable team alignment with a common technical direction or vision.
• You'll understand your team’s needs and goals and work with the Architect group to align your team’s priorities with Help Scout’s architectural north star.
• You'll facilitate movement and resolution of cross-team technical discussions.
• You’ll be working on a team of six and together with our software developers to build, deploy, secure, manage, and optimize highly available, fault-tolerant, and horizontally scalable systems in AWS.
• We are in the midst of a Platform Engineering transformation, enabling developers to own all aspects of their projects, while we serve as trusted advisors, making sure we create as much opportunity for developer autonomy as we can while maintaining security and stability of our infrastructure.
• Our engineering teams communicate mostly via Slack and are committed to remote, agile development. When your code is ready, you’ll create and send a pull request with test cases and tag your team for review.
• You’ll work autonomously for the most part, and we trust you to get work done when/where you can be productive.
• To ensure excellent service to our customers, you will be part of our rotating on-call team.

A note about on-call

• Our on-call shift is not particularly wearisome, but as a thank you for carrying the weight for the week, the day following your shift is a free day off if you want to take it. We want you happy, healthy, and well-rested!

About you

• You are a seasoned technical practitioner and developer, capable of mentoring and providing support to your peers.
• You aren’t afraid to ask questions and rumble to create the best experience for our customers.
• You are an excellent active listener and do so with humility and empathy.
• You naturally build trusting relationships with your team and peers. You are willing to debate the other side of an issue and try on other people’s perspectives.
• You have a growth mindset, a passion for learning, and are willing to lean into discomfort for the good of our customers and product.
• You are a proactive communicator, both verbally and in writing. You document proposals and plans with clarity so that our fully distributed team and our future team members can quickly get up to speed.
• You relish a challenge and enjoy figuring out how to improve things.
• You can balance contributing to the code and providing technical leadership and enhanced collaboration within and across teams.
• You became an engineer because you like building systems, tools or products that help people.
• You write code that other engineers can easily read and understand, and you welcome reviews and feedback from your peers. You are comfortable writing tests, and you thoroughly verify your work before you deploy.
• 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 and time-management style to be remote-friendly.
• You have a profound understanding of what it takes to run SaaS at scale and have a solid understanding of Linux systems and networking; from kernel to shell, system libraries, file systems and client-server protocols.
• You are proficient and comfortable in the AWS ecosystem.
• You have experience building continuous deployment and testing tools (Containers, Argo, EKS, Kubernetes).
• You design and build systems that work well and fail gracefully.
• Security engineering is near and dear to your heart; you build with and advocate for a security mindset when implementing new features and infrastructure.
• You question why. Why do we do it this way? Why can't developers own this? How can we make that happen safely?

#LI-Remote 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 and foster care - 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 Bonuses - everyone is eligible to receive a quarterly bonus up to 8% based on shared company revenue goals. 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 160 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. We’re passionate about diversity and inclusion. The data is abundantly clear about diverse teams being more successful, and we're dedicated to setting the team up for success. Today our leadership team is 62% women, and that's just the start. Here's our DEI Dashboard where you can see all of our team demographic data and read about our commitment to this work. We're committed to SMBs for the long term. Help Scout is focused entirely on serving small and midsize businesses, typically up to 500 employees, because those companies view customer service differently. It's not a cost to be optimized, it's their most effective marketing tool and a key differentiator from the competition. We built Help Scout for companies that truly value being customer-centric (like us) and want a product that shares their values. We're leaving the world better than we found it. Did you know Help Scout is a certified B Corporation, with a mission to give away at least 1% of our product through Help Scout for Good ? Our company exists not just to help ourselves, but to invest in our team, our customers, our community, and our environment. Our commitment to you We are an equal opportunity employer and are committed to building a company that embraces and celebrates diversity and inclusion . We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status. We have read the studies and understand that diverse teams build better products, bring more perspective to the table, contribute to a company’s financial success and help foster a more inclusive environment for all employees, but the bottom line is that it's the right thing to do. Apply for this job