Technical Lead, Application Support

Overview

Technical Lead (Application Support) based in 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.

About Us

Spektrix is a growing collection of creative problem solvers focused around the arts and technology whose mission is to help arts organisations be more successful. Were doing this through a combination of cloud-based software and consultative customer support that empowers arts organisations to grow revenue, increase efficiency, and build stronger relationships with audiences. We are always looking for new ways to approach problems, share knowledge, and better serve our customers. Youd be joining a team of over 260, based across our New York, London and Manchester offices and working with over 700 arts organisations in North America and the UK.

The role

We are looking for an experienced Technical Lead to join our Technical Application Support Team. This team was established to provide fast turnaround for client support requests, respond to incidents and urgent issues during working hours, and help build parity of client experience across global timezones. The Technical Application Support 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.

Our Platform operates on both PaaS and IaaS infrastructure in Azure, and we work with other providers such as CloudFlare, Mailgun, and DotDigital. The Technical Application Support Team uses the tooling provided by the wider engineering department to monitor our applications and infrastructure and triage operational issues.

The ideal candidate will have extensive experience leading application support teams, and be well versed in operating a range of infrastructure assets and software services. They will be a member of the Technical Leadership Community which shapes our technical vision and strategy, and ensures the teams conformance to that strategy. This role will be part of a collaborative team leadership group made up of a Delivery Manager, Engineering Manager and Product Owner, all of whom have specific accountabilities, but are collectively responsible for ensuring that their team can deliver on their goals and continuously improve.

Candidates will be comfortable collaborating with 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 Responsibilities

• 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.
• 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.
• 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 its 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

Skills And Experience

• 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.

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.
• 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.

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 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 setup:

• 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.

We know that the best software is user-friendly and intuitive, so weve built every bit of Spektrix with usability in mind. Everything in the system is quick to learn and easy to use, whether youre a Box Office Manager, Marketing Assistant or Fundraising Director. Technology is constantly evolving to keep up with the pace we release daily upgrades so the 500+ organisations we work with (and their audiences) never have to wait for the newest and most innovative features.

Important Notice: We are aware that there have been scammers with malicious intentions utilizing misleading domains that may look similar to ours. Please be advised that all legitimate communications from Spektrix will come only from \”@spektrix.com\” or \”@pin-point.email\” email domains. Any others are not legitimate emails from Spektrix, and we strongly advise against sharing any personal details with them.

About Spektrix

At Spektrix, our mission is to provide arts organisations with the best possible chance of success. We do this by combining cloud-based technology with expert support and training consultancy, helping our clients grow their audiences and increase revenue. Were confident that Spektrix is the most forward-thinking ticketing, marketing and fundraising solution around.

We know that the best software is user-friendly and intuitive, so weve built every bit of Spektrix with usability in mind. Everything in the system is quick to learn and easy to use, whether youre a Box Office Manager, Marketing Assistant or Fundraising Director. Technology is constantly evolving to keep up with the pace we release daily upgrades so the 500+ organisations we work with (and their audiences) never have to wait for the newest and most innovative features.

Everything we do is about making our users lives easier, so everyone gets unlimited support and consultancy to get the most out of Spektrix. This ethos is reflected in our service charge an all-inclusive fee that scales with the size of your business. No upfront costs, no long-term tie-ins and no additional charges.

• Important Notice: We are aware that there have been scammers with malicious intentions utilizing misleading domains that may look similar to ours. Please be advised that all legitimate communications from Spektrix will come only from \”@spektrix.com\” or \”@pin-point.email\” email domains. Any others are not legitimate emails from Spektrix, and we strongly advise against sharing any personal details with them.