Help Scout

Engineering Coach

“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.