Sr. Java/Kotlin Engineer - Search

Who we are

At Help Scout, we’re on a mission to help businesses delight more customers. We’ve been on this journey since 2011, and today more than 10,000 companies use our platform to provide outstanding customer support. We’ve been fully remote from the beginning, and have a team of 130+ people all over the world.

We love crafting beautiful products and growing a business together, but we're also trying to do something bigger. We're building a company that brings out your best and leaves the world a better place — a company that seeks balance between profit and purpose. That's why we've been a Certified B Corporation since 2019 and have pledged 1% of our equity back to the community.

Help Scout’s success hinges on hiring talented, high-accountability people who want to be part of creating a culture where we all feel challenged and supported to do our best work. We hope that excites you to join us! 

Please note: For this role, we are only able to hire in the United States.

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 JVM 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. 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, 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 engineer (Java/Kotlin) 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 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.