Technical Lead, Application Support

• Location: London or Manchester. Remote working supported, around 10-20% on-site requirement to commute into either Manchester or London office as necessary for collaboration, monthly in-person days, and quarterly department days.
• Full-time or Part-time (flexible hours and working options available.  Paid on-call shifts and out-of-hours work required periodically) 
• Expected Start Date: ASAP 
• Salary Range: We are offering up to £80,000 for this role, depending on experience.

Key Responsibilities

Accountabilities

• Maintaining the configuration and accuracy of the team's operational dashboards, alerts, and PagerDuty schedules. Identifying and documenting observability gaps across the wider platform for resolution by engineering delivery teams.
• Apply and track usage of known workarounds and influence the rest of the engineering team on improvements needed for the 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.
• Keep the team working in line with our security and compliance policies and processes, particularly when working with customer data and production systems.
• Ensuring the principles of our technical strategy are embedded into our solutions and ways of working.
• Identify and document areas for improvement in the reliability, scalability and quality of Spektrix systems.
• Documenting, reporting, resolving, and mitigating defects, problems, risks, and instances of nonconformance.

Responsibilities

• 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 collaborate 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.

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 cloud resources to ensure everything runs smoothly, and put everything back in place after it’s over.
• You’ll lead a range of activities including discovery, investigation and spikes, writing or refining tickets, fault-finding and fixing, testing, documentation, and build and release tasks.
• 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.

Skills, Knowledge and Expertise

• Experience of leading an operations or support team, monitoring and supporting Azure-hosted SaaS applications.
  • Technical and Operational good practice and excellence.
  • Aligning teams with goals
  • Stakeholder management
• Deep understanding of SQL Server and/or Azure SQL, and database performance.
• Experience querying logs using query languages such as KQL, LogQL, Lucene, etc...
• Able to read and interpret logs and stack traces from C# .NET applications.
• Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code (specifically Terraform). While you will not be writing C# feature code, you must be able to read and navigate code to diagnose errors effectively.
• Experience with a range of alerting, performance, monitoring and security tools.  We use Azure Monitor, PagerDuty, Grafana, Logz.io, and Cloudflare tools; experience with these particular tools is not essential, but similar experience is 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.
• Communicate fluently with engineers as well as client success teams, and build relationships with stakeholders.
• Can break down and document complicated technical concepts concisely.
• Highly collaborative; Work closely with other leads and managers in the team leadership group.
• Giving and receiving feedback in an honest, kind, and reflective manner.  Learning from mistakes and being imaginative about ways to improve things.
• Coaching and mentoring your team.
• Curious, and keen to learn new skills and technologies.