PHP Engineer

Overview

PHP is at the heart of Help Scout’s web app. It touches nearly everything, and also powers our back-end administration application. Your work will empower over 8,000 businesses around the world to provide great customer service, and will support other senior engineers on your team.

• PHP 7.x
• Lumen, Laravel, and Symfony
• Backbone.js, Marionette.js, and React.js
• Node.js
• RabbitMQ
• Redis
• Pusher
• Java(APIs)
• MySQL, PostgreSQL, and MongoDB

• The engineering team currently has thirty-four talented engineers. You will be working on one of the Help Scout web app teams, which currently has 6 engineers (PHP, JavaScript). On a typical day you may help a customer with an issue, work on a new feature, create a third party integration or enhance back-end tools to support our growth team. On any given project, you will be communicating with internal APIs, integrating with 3rd party services, optimizing processes using Redis, RabbitMQ, various AWS services, and wrapping it all up in support of a Backbone/Marionette or React front end.
• Our engineering teams work in two-week iterations, communicate mostly via Slack and are committed to remote, agile development. When you are ready, you’ll create and send a pull request with test cases and tag your team for review (often over a video and screen-sharing session).
• We have invested heavily in local Docker development and cloud-based continuous integration and delivery so you can get setup fast and your development branch can be easily tested on environments that closely match production. You’ll work autonomously for the most part and we trust you to get work done when/where you can be productive.
• Your team performs engineering support when a question can’t be answered by our top-notch in-house support team and passes triage. We’ll get you up-to-speed with engineering support so you can help our customers and improve the product along the way.

• You are very experienced with modern PHP development practices and open source frameworks. You’ve worked on these sorts of projects at scale and feel confident solving complex problems. You view “best practices” as a starting point for critical thinking, rather than a dogma to follow.
• You have created a single page application using Backbone (or a similar framework) and can write JavaScript from scratch to implement a feature. Marionette and/or React experience is a bonus, but not required. We can help you pick it up.
• Your code is not only reliable and performant for customers, but can be read, maintained and understood easily by other engineers on your team. The Zen of Python resonates with you for any language.
• You believe in writing unit and integration tests and have at least tried TDD. You like owning the quality of the code you write— QA doesn’t mean throwing it over the wall for someone else to test. You understand that some things are too costly to automate and must be manually tested to get it right.
• You take pride in your work and ownership of the solutions you build. When a team member or customer is in need, you feel a sense of urgency to understand their pain and thoughtfully help.
• You are curious and constantly learning. Believing that “a rising tide lifts all ships,” you make everyone around you better sharing what you have learned and looking for ways to improve both yourself and the team.
• You are a humble professional who wants to be challenged by the work and not the workload. You are willing to ask for help when necessary and unafraid to say “I don’t know.” At the same time, you have the confidence to take on complex and challenging problems.
• You are proactive about solving problems and improving things. You take the initiative to build tools and processes that will help everyone. When working in the codebase, you leave things better than you found them.
• You are an excellent communicator who can write and speak with empathy for our customers and team. You can easily communicate complex ideas to both technical and non-technical audiences. Clear communication is super important in a remote culture like ours.
• You believe remote teams are the future of work, or are at least excited about the…