Engineering Coach

About Help Scout

Well, hello! We’re Help Scout. We make support software that empowers more than 12,000 businesses to support their customers in the most human, helpful way. We're a remote company with more than 175 employees in different locations around the world, and we've been remote-first from day one. We believe that when teams represent different backgrounds, perspectives, and experiences, magic happens. The result is better products and a culture that enables everyone to bring their authentic selves to work.

The Position

“Your role as a manager is not to do the work yourself, even if you are the best at it because that will only take you so far. Your role is to improve the purpose, people, and process of your team to get as high a multiplier effect on your collective outcome as you can.”

- Julie Zhou, author of The Making of a Manager.

At the heart of the role, a Coach at Help Scout is accountable for 2 things: 1) empowering your team to deliver a steady flow of high-quality customer value(i.e. mission aligned results), and 2) enabling the short and long-term success of the engineers on your team.

How you do that is layered, nuanced, and hopefully part of what motivates you to be a leader and coach. Working closely with product managers and designers, you will ensure that your team has the proper knowledge, staffing, and skills to succeed and do the best work of their career.

The Team

The Engineering team is one of the three-piece ensembles, along with Product and Design, that makes up our Experience Organization at Help Scout. You will report to our Director of Product Engineering, Julie Cousins, and will be part of our 9-person Engineering leadership team, including our CTO, Denny Swindle.

Engineers on your team(s) will be members of cross-functional groups working on mission-aligned initiatives. You’ll partner with Product and Design to empower engineers to understand and empathize with their customers, identify risks, determine milestones, and improve their craft. You’ll be a passionate catalyst for change that results from your team’s iteration and retrospectives.

Timezone Note

Given that we have remote team members living between EU through PT time zones, we require that your regular working hours overlap with 9 AM - 3 PM ET to ensure several solid blocks of overlap time with your team members.

About the Role

• You’ll be working with product people that challenge you to grow every day, including leaders in Design and Product. The founders and leadership team are technical and committed to creating a magical experience for our customers.
• You will deliver value to your team members by providing them with growth opportunities, balanced feedback, and support that promote their career goals.
• Ultimately an engineer’s success within a team is a measure of your success as a coach. When they are doing their best work, and you provide thoughtful coaching and mentorship without being too hands-on, that’s how you know it’s working.
• Our teams are organized and committed to Lean Flow, and part of your job is to support, coach and reinforce this, and highlight and correct for anti-patterns to our agreed-upon practices.
• You will partner with your Product Managers, Product Designers and Tech Lead partners to co-create the roadmap for your team(s), helping to plan the strategic technology initiatives required to support future customer solutions.
• You will be responsible for identifying and anticipating future staffing needs and proactively engaging and partnering with our Talent team to support our hiring practices.
• Everything is secondary to the customer experience. We expect every engineer to have a keen sense of how their code will impact that experience concerning performance, availability, security, usability and accessibility.

Requirements

• You've managed engineering teams comprised of engineering with diverse tenure and backgrounds and are no stranger to what it takes to help your team achieve great things.
• You believe that few things are more professionally gratifying than empowering others to do the best work of their careers.
• In the past, you've been a successful engineer. However, your passion has been leading, mentoring, and coaching people to accomplish great things. You are passionate about helping people evolve to the next stage in their careers.
• You default to non-defensive listening and believe in leading with humility and vulnerability. You excel at building excellent relationships with your team and peers.
• You are an outstanding communicator, both verbally and in writing. In a remote team, your writing skills are critical to your success in this role.
• You lean into having difficult conversations with people to resolve a situation and do what is right. You understand the value of direct, transparent, respectful feedback and know it's a gift your teammates can use to grow and develop their superpowers.
• You know how to absorb ambiguity and spread clarity; you can distill and connect the big-picture goals to your team's day-to-day work and help them understand their work's more significant impact.
• You are incredibly thoughtful when hiring people for your team and work actively to identify your team's growth areas. You prioritize hiring someone that is a long-term compliment to the team versus someone who works and thinks like everyone else.
• You believe diverse teams are critical for high performance and understand the value of fostering an inclusive environment for your team to thrive. You know the significant impact you can have as a coach on DEI efforts in hiring and promoting team members.
• You believe remote teams are the future of work and have experience working with remote teams or can adjust your work/management style to be remote-friendly.

Our Hiring Process

1. Value add. You'll have a video call with the hiring manager to get to know you and see if you have potential to be a great addition to the team.
2. Tech screen. You’ll have a video call with one of your potential teammates to dive into more questions around skills and experience.
3. Logistics chat. You'll have a video call with a People Ops teammate to go over fun things like salary expectations, the benefits we offer, and dig into our company culture.
4. Take-home project. At this stage, you'll receive a relevant take-home project that gives you a chance to showcase your skills (and we'll pay you for your time).
5. Final chat. You’ll have one more video call, likely with someone from our leadership team.
6. References. We ask to chat with three references. Preferably, at least two should be previous managers.
7. Offer. We make an offer to a candidate we feel is the best addition to our team!

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 and foster care - 12 weeks of paid leave for all new parents, including adoption and foster care.
• 401k with 1% match- via Betterment for Business (currently US only)
• Personal Development stipend - Up to $1,800 per year to improve your craft
• Bonuses - everyone is eligible to receive a quarterly bonus up to 8% based on shared company revenue goals.
• Set you up for success — we’ll get every new teammate a Mac laptop or equivalent of their choice, and a $1500 stipend so you can feel ready to work from home. We also cover 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.