Application Support Engineer

Application Support Engineer

We are looking for an Application Support Engineer to join our Reactive Team. The Reactive Team was established to provide fast turnaround for client support requests, respond to incidents and urgent issues during UK working hours, and help build parity of client experience across global timezones. The Reactive Team is the escalation point into Engineering; this team leads on observability practices, and investigates and triages operational issues in collaboration with the wider Engineering team.

We operate both PaaS and IaaS infrastructure as well as managed services such as Cloudflare, Redis and DotDigital in our estate, the Reactive Team manages observability and stability of this shared infrastructure.

The ideal candidate will be familiar with operating a range of infrastructure assets and software services. They will be comfortable talking to both our client support teams to resolve client issues, and account managers who represent our 3rd party software suppliers. They will also be excited about joining a culture of collaboration where they share ideas, knowledge, and skills with their colleagues.

Accountabilities and Responsibilities

Ensuring observability tools are configured to give visibility of the health of the estate.

Apply and track usage of known work arounds and advise the rest of the engineering team on improvements needed to reliability and quality of the product.

Ensuring problems and tasks are investigated thoroughly and solved accurately and methodically.

Responding to incidents in a timely way, in line with our processes.

Keeping our how-to guides and documentation up-to-date and concise.

Working in line with our security and compliance policies and processes, particularly when working with customer data and production systems.

Maintaining and improving the reliability, scalability, and quality of operational Spektrix services and systems.

Documenting, reporting, resolving, and mitigating defects, problems, risks, and instances of nonconformance.

Continuously improving how we document, investigate, and triage issues.

Sharing what we learn through dashboards, incident reviews, updated documentation, and collaborative work such as coaching.

Seeking opportunities to automate things and collaborating on internal improvement projects.

Applying Lean principles, and using analysis and data to pinpoint where things are getting stuck. Identify opportunities for eliminating waste and delivering more effectively and efficiently.

Collaborating with Product, Engineering, and our First-Line Support teams to make sure we are prioritising the right things.

Contribute to platform resilience strategies such as capacity planning, redundancy, failover, and disaster recovery.

Ensuring the accuracy, relevance, and usefulness of our alerts, monitoring, and observability.

Participate in or lead post-incident reviews, and identify required actions.

Design and maintain operational runbooks and readiness checklists.

Key Requirements

Experience of working in an operations or support team, managing Azure-hosted SaaS applications.

SQL Server and Azure SQL.

Log Analytics and Kusto Query Language (KQL).

Able to read and understand logs and stack traces from C# .NET applications. You don't need to be a software engineer, but familiarity with C# and TDD would be useful.

Experience with a range of alerting and monitoring tools. We use Application Insights, Azure Monitor, Pagerduty, Grafana, Logz.io, and Cloudflare tools; experience with these particular tools is not essential - similar experience is welcome.

Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines, Azure Devops, and Terraform would be beneficial but not essential.

Can calmly, confidently, and competently co-ordinate incident response; clearly communicating accurate, timely, and relevant information to a range of stakeholders across the organisation.

Highly collaborative; Can communicate fluently with engineers as well as client success teams. Can break down and document complicated technical requirements concisely.

Giving and receiving feedback in an honest, kind, and reflective manner. Learning from mistakes and being imaginative about ways to improve things.

Curious, and keen to learn new skills and technologies.

A Day In The Life Of…

On a typical day, you'll be working closely with colleagues pairing in a virtual meeting room, collaborating on items from the team's Kanban board and identifying areas for improvement. The team aligns at daily standup on work in progress, current priorities, and any support or assistance needed.

We review incoming work requests together to understand their context and urgency. Using self-organising principles, the team decides how to divide the work - whether pairing, mobbing, or working solo - based on what's most effective.

If Clients are putting high-demand tickets on-sale today, you may need to scale a client out of their DB pool to ensure everything runs smoothly, and put everything back in place after it's over.

You'll contribute to a range of activities including discovery, investigation and spikes, writing or refining tickets, fault-finding and fixing, testing, documentation, and build and release tasks. When it's the team's turn to handle the release, you'll take part in the release process.

Throughout the day, you'll monitor alerts and investigate any that arise. If needed, you may join the Incident Room alongside a small group of cross-functional colleagues to calmly and methodically identify and resolve issues. This is done in close collaboration with customer-facing teams to ensure clarity and continuity.

At other times, you'll participate in team sessions focused on reflecting, planning, and finding ways to improve how we work together and deliver on our goals.

Benefits

Flexible working with support for WFH set up. Different teams may have different practices that require people in the office or online at specific times.

NHS top up scheme (covering dental, optical, therapy & counselling, prescription and other health related costs)

Continuous development supported by Line manager, learning budget

Enhanced Maternity, Adoption & Shared Parental Leave

35 days paid leave annually, inclusive of annual leave, bank holidays and a Birthday day off, all able to use flexibly

4 weeks paid sabbatical after 5 years of service

2 volunteering days per year

Company pension scheme of 4%

Free snacks, drinks and breakfast items in all our offices

Varied range of regular socials across all our offices

Cycle to work & Season Ticket Loans

Travel stipend for commuting

Working from home

We aim to be as flexible as possible when it comes to working setups and lots of our team work from home on a regular basis. This means we generally work with a "remote first" approach even when we are in the office.

We'll provide reasonable support and all the hardware you need to get started, but we do require that you have the following already in place for a good home working set up:

A quiet working space at home where you can consistently take video calls without interruptions

An internet connection that supports your participation in video calls and access to our systems and service.

Travelling into your local office (commuting) is at your own expense with a stipend available, any travel for business (other than commuting) will be covered by Spektrix.

Equal opportunities

Spektrix is an equal opportunities employer, we recruit regardless of race, religion, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, age or disability status and look to employ from a wide range of backgrounds and experiences.

Confidence can sometimes hold us back from applying for a job. Studies show that women do not apply for roles unless they meet 100% of the requirements, whereas men apply when they meet at least 60% of the requirements. At Spektrix, we know that there's no such thing as a 'perfect' candidate. Spektrix is committed to creating an inclusive work environment, where our team members are supported in expressing themselves and delivering their best work.

So however you identify and whatever background you bring with you, please apply if this is a role that would make you excited to come into work every day.

Diversity in the workplace is hugely important to our working environment and to enable both individuals and Spektrix to thrive. By valuing each person's differences we enable each person to contribute their unique experiences, strengths and viewpoints. Workplace diversity is something we aim to achieve and maintain at Spektrix, and we are pursuing a workforce that reflects the diversity of the communities we serve and work in.

In an effort to help us reduce bias, please do