Ops Engineer

As a member of our Ops team, you will be at the heart of nearly every application, tool, and service at Help Scout. The work you do everyday will reflect the team mission: Ensure uptime and security across all of our applications while developing and supporting tools to enable customer bliss. While the mission might be straightforward, anyone who has delivered high availability services and developer tooling at scale, knows this is no simple task.

To help us with our mission, we are seeking an experienced Ops Engineer to join our team. You will have a direct impact on Help Scout’s success, while helping more than 8,000 businesses around the world. While customers love our product, it means nothing if they can't access our services with great performance.

Technologies we work with

• AWS, Linux (Ubuntu/CentOS), Chef, Git/Github, RabbitMQ, AWS Aurora MySQL & PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, Jenkins, Docker/Compose, New Relic, Sensu, PagerDuty, Ruby, Go, Python, Java, and PHP.

About the role

• You’ll be working on a small team of six (that includes one of our co-founders) and in collaboration with our software developers to build, deploy, secure, manage, and optimize highly-available, fault-tolerant, and horizontally scalable systems in AWS.
• Ideally, we are looking to add more coverage to the(UTC-5) timezone, but we are open to candidate in UTC-6,-7, or-8 if you are willing to time shift to accommodate the preferred timezone.
• 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.
• We are investing heavily in continuous integration and delivery and strive to uphold immutable infrastructure standards.
• You’ll work autonomously for the most part and we trust you to get work done when/where you can be productive.
• In order to ensure excellent service to our customers, you will be part of our rotating on-call team.

A note about on-call

• The 5-week rotation follows this format: 1 week on backup on-call(which rarely sees much action), 1 week of being on-call, followed by a 3 week hiatus from 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 have a deep 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 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 proficient and comfortable in the AWS ecosystem.
• 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 are adept at automating service and infrastructure configuration via industry standard tools(E.g. Chef, Terraform).
• You have experience building continuous deployment and testing tools. Bonus points if you’ve built and managed a containerized production deployment environment at scale.
• You have experience working with MTAs(e.g exim, postfix) and SPAM filtering(e.g. rspamd, SpamAssassin)
• You have experience building continuous deployment and testing tools. Bonus points if you’ve built and managed a containerized production deployment environment at scale.
• You became an engineer because you like building systems, tools or products that help people.
• You design and build systems that work well and fail gracefully.
• You write code and scripts 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’re a great communicator and have an excellent command of written and spoken English.As a remote company, we rely on clear communication for collaboration and execution.
• 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 are helpful and empathetic and care about building on our company culture that embraces these qualities.

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.
• 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 offer a healthcare stipend.
• 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.
• Paid parental leave, including adoption and foster care - 12 weeks for primary caretaker and 4 weeks for secondary caretaker.
• 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).
• Home Office Stipend - You'll also receive $1,000 to spend on outfitting your home office, as well as up to $350 a month to rent a co-working space if you like.
• 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.