Sr. Software Engineer, Platform at Help Scout
$156,000–$182,000
Jul 21, 2026
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Jul 23, 2026
What this job asks for AI summary
A backend platform engineering role focused on large-scale search and data infrastructure, working on systems that handle thousands of transactions per second. The work centers on building and evolving streaming data pipelines, improving search relevancy and data indexing, and scaling a high-throughput event-driven architecture using tools like Elasticsearch, ClickHouse, Kafka, and Flink. Primary development is in Kotlin and Java, with some European timezone overlap required.
Senior level · Remote · Full-time
“or” means any one of them counts — you don't need all of them.
We read this from the posting text with AI. Skim the description below before ruling yourself out.
How this req sits in the market our data
Roughly 44,200 people nationally plausibly meet what this posting asks for (software developers). range 26,500–66,500
Applicant volume Moderate — A normal amount of company. The rare requirements below are what will separate a shortlisted application from the rest.
What the occupation pays Median $138,970 (middle half $107,524–$175,762).
Estimated from BLS employment for this occupation and area, per-skill prevalence across our listing corpus, and published wage benchmarks — as of Jul 28, 2026. It is a model, not a headcount.
Why we read it this way (5)
The title 'Platform Engineer' carries no seniority level word, so advertised seniority is Unspecified; however, the role explicitly calls for 'experienced' and 'senior' engineers, ownership across the full development lifecycle, and architectural decision-making, supporting a Senior classification.
Kotlin and Java are listed as the primary backend languages under 'About you' with firm language ('You are a passionate Backend Engineer (Java/Kotlin)'), so they are treated as a paired hard gate — either satisfies the requirement.
Elasticsearch, ClickHouse, Solr, Kafka, Flink, RabbitMQ, MySQL, PostgreSQL, AWS, JavaScript, PHP, and GitHub all appear in the 'Our Tech Stack' narrative section. The posting explicitly states that knowledge of Elasticsearch/ClickHouse/Solr 'is not required' and is 'a nice bonus,' so all stack technologies are marked preferred.
Full-stack experience (JavaScript/PHP) is explicitly framed as 'bonus points,' confirming preferred status.
The role is US-only and fully remote, with a soft preference for Eastern or Central Time zones to support overlap with European teammates — not a hard location gate.
Read the full posting
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