DESCRIPTION

• Team: Engineering
• Location: London or Manchester. Hybrid working supported, around 10-20% on-site requirement with the ability to commute into either Manchester or London office as necessary for collaboration, monthly in-person days, and quarterly department days.
• Full-time - flexible hours and working options available (please state in your application)
• Expected Start Date: ASAPSalary Range: We would like to pay in the range of £40,000-50,000 per annum for this role, depending on experience and location.
• 
  Spektrix is a technology company with a deep connection to the arts. Our mission is to help arts organisations thrive by providing cloud-based ticketing and CRM software, alongside consultative support that drives revenue, improves efficiency, and builds stronger audience relationships. We work with over 600 organisations across the UK, Ireland, the United States and Canada, supported by a team of around 250 colleagues based in London, Manchester and New York.
  We’re a collaborative team of problem-solvers who value transparency, continuous improvement, and a low-ego environment. Our engineers are responsible for developing and maintaining our market-leading platform, working closely with others across the business. We have eight engineering delivery teams, each with clear areas of ownership, all operating with Kanban, XP and Lean principles in a continuous delivery environment.
  We believe in-person time is crucial for building trust, empathy and alignment across our hybrid teams. Engineering teams meet monthly for in-person team days, with quarterly department-wide sessions and stakeholder check-ins. As a team member, you can expect to be in one of our UK offices 10-20% of the time.
  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.

KEY REQUIREMENTS

Skills and Experience:

• 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.

Communications and Behaviours:

• 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.
• 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.

• 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.