Infrastructure Automation Engineer

Your impact

Collaborating with our engineering teams you will help build and refine our CI/CD pipelines and AWS automation tools to ensure we have best in class high availability, while increasing engineering velocity. This is a critical role that will influence every engineer in the company and directly impacts more than 7,000 businesses around the world so they can deliver a great customer support experience. No matter how elegant our product is, it means nothing if customers can't always access our services with great performance.

Some of the tools we use

• Amazon Web Services
• Jenkins
• Cloud Formation
• Chef
• Capistrano
• Git + Github
• PagerDuty
• Slack

ABOUT THE ROLE

• No matter what you want to call it: DevOps, production engineering, continuous delivery, immutable infrastructure, or site reliability you will be working on our key priorities: four 9s high availability and continuous integration / deployment automation. You will lead the implementation and roadmap planning for improvements to our automation, tools and tests to support these priorities.
• The majority of your time will be spent building or implementing continuous delivery, test and self-healing automation tools. You will be a key internal champion for any and all changes to make our production environments more resilient, scalable, and performant.
• Our 100% remote engineering team spends most of their time in Slack and Github. Engineers can focus for long stretches with typically only 2 scheduled meetings a week (one with your team and one with your manager). Software engineers write their own automated unit and integration tests, and use our CI pipeline to release code to production several times a day. You can read more about our culture and how our remote team stays agile at https://www.helpscout.net/blog/agile-remote-teams/

ABOUT YOU

• You have designed continuous delivery and test automation for SaaS projects supporting tens of thousands of simultaneous active users, so you have a good sense of what the road ahead looks like and what we could be doing better.
• You have worked extensively with a wide range of Amazon Web Services and are familiar with the benefits and challenges of their offerings. You know how to design systems for failure and how to autoscale and recover systems on AWS to ensure high availability.
• You are well-versed in modern system orchestration, configuration management, and application deployment tooling and practices (even if they differ from our current tool set).
• You have a deep understanding of what it takes to run web services at scale and have a solid understanding of Linux systems internals and networking; from kernel to shell, system libraries, file systems and client-server protocols.
• You love to dig into the details and automate manual processes whenever possible. You're comfortable with tools providing operational insights, log searching, and stats analysis.
• A big part of being great at your job revolves around being very organized and communicative. It’s clear from your experience that you have those characteristics.
• You’ve got a strong engineering background and have done a little of everything. It’s clear you are a curious person that prefers to get stuff done rather than delegate.

ABOUT US

• Help Scout is a remote team with employees in eleven countries (eight people in the Boston office). We optimize for excellence over geography and overcome remote challenges through transparency, trust, chat and video conferencing.
• We’re a customer-driven company and always will be. Everything follows the customer experience, no exceptions.
• Our company is growing quickly and has aspirations of helping millions of people around the world. Accomplishing our goals will present countless challenges and require you to excel in every aspect of the position. It’s hard work, but the people we’re looking for love exploring and solving hard problems.
• This is not the typical startup “rocket ship”. We’ll never compromise customers or the experience in favor of growth. Our purpose is to build a profitable company that small businesses love and sustain it. We optimize your career at Help Scout for the long term as well, so keeping a healthy work/life balance is an important priority.
• We are an equal opportunity employer and value diversity at our company. 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.

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 - Work from our office in Boston or anywhere else, provided you have 4 hours of overlap with the team. We’ll even buy your home office furniture or help you pay for a co-working space.
• 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 Harvard Pilgrim HMO or PPO policies.
• 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.
• International Benefit Stipend - If you’re based outside the US, you’ll receive a monthly stipend that goes towards covering medical insurance, long and short-term disability, and accountant costs.
• Flexible vacation - Take time off when you need it, we trust you.
• 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- 1% Retirement Plan matching for both US and International Employees
• Personal development stipend - Up to $1,800 per year to improve your craft
• Great tools - Each employee receives a Mac laptop and 27'' display (or equivalent). We’ll also purchase any of the software or hardware you need.
• Complete transparency - Everyone has full access to business metrics and financial information about the company.