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.
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 10,000 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 four 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 a team member in the North or South American timezones.
- 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 6-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 4 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 growth mindset, a passion for learning, and are willing to lean into discomfort for the good of our customers and product.
- You became an engineer because you like building systems, tools or products that help people.
- 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.
- 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 are proficient and comfortable in the AWS ecosystem.
- 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. (Docker, ECS, EKS, Kubernetes)
- You design and build systems that work well and fail gracefully.
- 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 have experience working with MTAs (e.g exim, postfix) and SPAM filtering (e.g. rspamd, SpamAssassin)
Benefits
Competitive salary - Our salary formula is public to all employees (but doesn't divulge your specific salary) and we update it at least once per year. Your salary is the same no matter where you live. Our goal is to pay at or above the market rate of a US-based tech hub like Boston or Seattle.
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 recommend 3-4 weeks in addition to public holidays, but there are no firm rules. We trust you.
Sabbatical - After you've been at Help Scout for 4 years, you get a month of paid vacation (in addition to regular vacation) and $2,500 to spend towards travel, learning, projects or anything else during your time off. Read about what our CEO did.
Paid parental leave, including adoption - 12 weeks of paid leave for all new parents.
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 display (or equivalent equipment of choice). We’ll also purchase any additional software or hardware you need.
Home office stipend - Every new hire gets $1,500 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.