Senior Java/Kotlin Engineer, Search

Senior Java/Kotlin Engineer, Search at Help Scout

At Help Scout, we’re on a mission to help businesses delight more customers. Since 2011, over 10,000 companies have relied on our platform for outstanding customer support. We are a fully remote company with a team of 130+ people globally.

We are a Certified B Corporation since 2019, committed to balancing profit and purpose, and have pledged 1% of our equity to the community. Help Scout thrives on hiring talented, high-accountability individuals who contribute to a culture of challenge and support. Please note: This role is open only to candidates located in the United States.

Join the Search and Data Services Team

You will be an integral part of the Search and Data Services team, powering critical search capabilities that our customers depend on daily. This involves managing large, frequently changing datasets with thousands of transactions per second.

We are looking for an ideal candidate who prides themselves on building coherent, usable interfaces and creating elegant, scalable solutions by selecting the right tools for the job. Your expertise as an experienced JVM Engineer will empower over 12,000 businesses worldwide to provide excellent customer service and support your senior engineering peers.

While expertise in Elasticsearch, ClickHouse, and Solr is a bonus, it is not a requirement.

Our Tech Stack

We develop primarily in Kotlin, Java, JavaScript, and PHP. Our infrastructure leverages Elasticsearch, ClickHouse, Kafka, Flink, RabbitMQ, MySQL, and PostgreSQL. We are currently migrating parts of our search infrastructure from Solr to Elasticsearch. We utilize AI to boost productivity and are heavy users of the AWS ecosystem. Our team also uses Slack, GitHub, and Linear for collaboration.

About The Role

As a Senior Java/Kotlin Engineer, Search, you will join the Search and Data Services team, focusing on the next generation of our large-scale search and reporting service and its associated infrastructure. A key aspect of your role will be 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.

Your day-to-day work will involve building new features, enhancing existing systems, and evolving data pipelines, with a strong emphasis on scalability, testing, and maintainability. You will be actively involved in the full development lifecycle, from design and implementation decisions to testing strategies and backlog prioritization. Collaboration is key; you will participate in code reviews and architectural discussions across engineering. The team also provides engineering support for issues escalating beyond our customer support team, and you will be trained to help customers directly to gain insights for product improvement. You’ll work alongside talented peers across Engineering, Product, and Design, guided by a leadership team dedicated to your growth, all focused on delivering a truly delightful customer experience. Occasionally, you will partner with our Talent team to help interview and hire future teammates.

About You

You are a passionate Java/Kotlin engineer who thrives on building scalable, maintainable, and easy-to-read software. You excel at balancing business goals with customer needs to create lasting solutions that offer a great experience for both users and fellow developers. You take full ownership of your work throughout the development lifecycle, from initial design and planning to deployment and production monitoring. You care deeply about production readiness, encompassing automation, reliability, resilience, monitoring, alerting, and logging.

As a collaborative and supportive team member, you enjoy sharing knowledge, mentoring others, and contributing to technical decision-making. You view feedback – both giving and receiving it – as crucial for individual and team growth. You communicate clearly and confidently in written and spoken English, which is essential for effective collaboration in our fully remote environment. To facilitate seamless 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: We support each other and our customers with generosity and empathy.

Craft over Convention: We insist on quality, focus, and relentless pursuit of customer delight.

Progress not Perfection: We foster curiosity and openness, learning quickly from mistakes.

Own the Outcome: We take full responsibility for our work, decisions, and meaningful results.

Benefits And Perks

• Competitive salary with a transparent, market-data-based formula.
• Flexible time off – choose your own holidays and vacations.
• 12 weeks of fully paid parental leave for all new parents, including adoption and foster care.
• A home office stipend for setup and productivity.
• A co-working stipend up to $300 a month if you choose to work outside your home.
• A yearly professional development stipend of $1,800 to enhance your skills.
• Top-tier health insurance for you and your dependents if you’re in the U.S. or Canada.

Key skills/competency

• Java
• Kotlin
• Elasticsearch
• Kafka
• AWS Ecosystem
• Scalability
• Data Pipelines
• System Design
• Distributed Systems
• Software Engineering