About this role.
Help Scout is hiring a senior platform-focused software engineer for its Search and Data Services team. The role centers on scaling high-throughput, event-driven search and reporting systems, including data pipelines, indexing, search relevance, reliability, and cost control. The engineer will work primarily with Java and Kotlin alongside Elasticsearch, ClickHouse, Kafka, Flink, relational databases, and AWS. This is a US-only, fully remote full-time role requiring at least four hours of overlap with Central European working hours. The position also includes architecture, code-review, mentoring, production-support, and hiring contributions.
Role DNA
A quick view of the complexity, pace, ownership and collaboration implied by the job description.
Job Complexity
5/5Pace & Pressure
4/5Autonomy Level
5/5Communication Load
5/5Salary analysis
Estimated compensation compared with the broader US market for similar roles.
Core skills
Skills and capabilities most closely associated with this opportunity.
Sample interview questions
I would begin with workload profiling and explicit service-level objectives for latency, throughput, freshness, and cost. I would identify bottlenecks across ingestion, queues, indexing, storage, and query execution, then prioritize horizontally scalable designs, partitioning, backpressure, caching, and observability. I would validate changes with realistic load tests and incremental rollouts.
I would define event schemas and compatibility rules, partition topics according to ordering and throughput requirements, and make consumers idempotent. In Flink, I would use checkpointing, durable state management, dead-letter handling, and metrics for lag, failures, and data quality. I would also document replay and recovery procedures so the pipeline can be safely rebuilt after incidents.
I start with the user intent and measurable relevance outcomes, such as click-through, successful resolution, and query refinement rates. I evaluate analyzers, field mappings, boosting, synonyms, typo tolerance, recency, and tenant-specific signals, then test changes against a representative query set. I would release relevance changes gradually and monitor both quality metrics and query performance.
Production readiness includes automated tests, safe deployment and rollback paths, structured logging, dashboards, actionable alerts, and clear operational ownership. I also review failure modes such as dependency outages, malformed events, traffic spikes, and partial writes, and build appropriate timeouts, retries, circuit breakers, and idempotency. Finally, I make runbooks and incident learnings accessible to the team.
I clarify the customer outcome, constraints, and the smallest valuable release early in planning. I distinguish reversible decisions from foundational ones, communicate trade-offs clearly, and propose phased delivery when a complete solution would delay learning. This enables the team to ship useful work while preserving a maintainable path for future scale and iteration.
Who we are
Help Scout started in 2011 with a simple premise: support software should treat customers like people, not tickets. 3+ billion conversations later, more than 10,000 companies use Help Scout to grow relationships with customers of all types, from clients to patients and beyond.
Now we’re in a new chapter: not only building AI that gives teams more space to focus on the customer experience, but also reimagining how we operate in an AI-native world. That means shipping and learning faster, without compromising on craft. Great work here carries a strong opinion and sweats the details, regardless of the tools we use to drive it.
We’ve been a fully remote team since day one, with 120+ teammates now all over the world. It’s a culture where you’ll be trusted to take ownership, stay curious, and raise the quality of work around you. It comes with clear expectations and a team that will push you to do some of the best work of your career.
If that kind of challenge gives you energy, we’d love to meet you.
This is a full-time, remote position with 4 hours of required overlap with Central European working hours.
At this time, we are only able to hire in the United States.
Your Impact
Join the Search and Data Services team at Help Scout! Your work on this team will power critical search capabilities that our customers depend on every day. You’ll manage large, frequently changing datasets with thousands of transactions per second.
Our ideal candidate takes pride in building coherent and usable interfaces, choosing the right tools for the job, and creating elegant, scalable solutions. Your work as an experienced Platform Engineer will empower over 12,000 businesses around the world to provide excellent customer service and will support the other senior engineers on your team.
We leverage Elasticsearch, ClickHouse, and Solr for several tools at Help Scout, but knowledge or even expertise in these tools is not required. It is a nice bonus, though.
Our Tech Stack
We develop in Kotlin, Java, JavaScript, and PHP.
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.
About the role
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.
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.
About you
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.
Benefits And Perks
Competitive salary and an internal, transparent salary formula based on market data
Flexible time off – you choose the holidays and vacations that make sense for you
12 weeks of fully paid parental leave for all new parents, including adoption and foster care
A home office stipend to help you get set up and productive
A co-working stipend up to $300 a month if you choose to work out of your house
A yearly professional development stipend of $1,800 to help you grow in your craft
If you’re in the U.S. or Canada, we offer top tier health insurance for you and your dependents.
Hiring Guidelines:
All roles at Help Scout are fully remote. Some positions have specific location requirements. For roles outside the U.S. and Canada, we work with teammates as independent contractors under country-specific agreements.
We do not sponsor visas. Teammates must already be authorized to work from their home country.
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.
To provide you with the best experience, we can support you with accommodations or adjustments at any stage of the recruitment process. Simply inform our recruitment team during your conversation with them.
A note on the use of AI in our interview process
While we understand that AI is an important tool in a modern skillset, we ask that you do not utilize AI assistants live on our interviews. Of course, use any tools you need to prepare! But we’d like for you to have a real human-to-human conversation with our team.
On our end, we utilize a platform called Brighthire as a notetaker and review tool to ensure a fair and transparent hiring process.
Beware of scammers! All legitimate communication from Help Scout regarding your application will come directly from an @helpscout.com email address and through our applicant tracking system, Ashby. We will never ask for personal financial information or conduct interviews outside of these official channels.
Upload your resume now
- To unlock remote work opportunities and be discovered by global employers.
This job listing has been manually reviewed by the Jobicy Trust & Safety Team for compliance with our posting guidelines, including verification of the company's legitimacy, accuracy of job details, clarity of remote work policy, and absence of misleading or fraudulent content.
