NOW HIRING: PHP Engineer

Company: Help Scout
Website: https://www.helpscout.com/
Headquarters: Boston, MA, United States


PHP is at the heart of Help Scout’s web app-- it touches nearly everything we do. Your work will empower over 9,000 businesses around the world to provide great customer service, and will support other senior engineers on your team. Our engineering organization is just over forty people, around half the company. You will join a small cross-functional crew that includes product management, designers, JavaScript, quality and other PHP engineers.  Everyone on the team is a senior professional in their craft.

Tools we use:

• PHP 7.x
• Lumen, Laravel, Symfony Console, and a custom PHP framework with League components
• MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB
• RabbitMQ
• Redis
• React & Redux, Backbone & Marionette
• Webpack, Babel, ES6, and Pusher
• Modular and functional CSS with Help Scout Seed
• Component-based design systems with Help Scout Blue

About the role

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. On any given project, you will be communicating with internal APIs, integrating with 3rd party services, optimizing processes using Redis, RabbitMQ and various AWS services, and wrapping it all up in support of a React or Backbone/Marionette 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.  The team pair as needed over video or screen-sharing sessions.
We have invested heavily in local Docker development and AWS-based continuous integration and delivery so you can get setup fast.  Any 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 support team. 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 could be changed to positively impact their experience in terms of performance, security, privacy 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.


About you

• You are very experienced with modern PHP development practices and open source frameworks. You’ve engineered other SaaS projects at scale and feel confident solving difficult problems.  
• You are comfortable designing elegant solutions that degrade gracefully when faced with extreme load or stress.  
• You view“best practices” as a starting point for critical thinking, rather than a dogma to follow. 
• You have modern JavaScript skills including frameworks and can utilize them when needed. If you have worked with React/Redux or Backbone/Marionette, that is great, but it is 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 enjoy the finish work and detail required to deliver a rich product with exceptional UX. From UI interactions to handling important edge cases, you take satisfaction in delivering a solid experience that delights the users, adds value to the business, and lasts over time.
• 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.” 
• You are proactive about solving problems and improving things. 
• You take the initiative to build tools and processes that will help everyone.  
• 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 - Provided you have 4 hours of overlap with the team. We’ll fly you to Boston for a week of new employee on-boarding
• 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 trust you.
• Sabbatical - After you've been at Help Scout for 5 years, you get a month of paid vacation plus $2500 to spend towards travel, learning, projects or however you'd like to spend that time.
• 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- via Betterment for Business (currently US only)
• Personal Development stipend - Up to $1,800 per year to improve your craft
• Great tools - Each employee will be provided with a Mac laptop and 27'' display (or equivalent equipment of choice). We’ll also purchase any additional software or hardware you need.
• Home office stipend - Every new hires gets $1000 USD to furnish their home office, and 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 80 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 9,000+ 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.


Diversity & Inclusion

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.

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