Location: Hybrid, with an office location in Edinburgh (Heriot-Watt Research Park), with occasional offsite work.

Salary: up to £35,000 to reflect the experience

Summary

Computer Application Services (CAS) are looking for an Infrastructure Engineer to join the CAS Infrastructure Team on a permanent basis. The job is based in our office at the Heriot-Watt Research Park.

What is CAS?

CAS is an employee-owned software company, with all permanent staff having the opportunity to own shares. The working atmosphere is collaborative, and the office is welcoming. At the same time, we take our work seriously and have ambitions for the company to grow: we have expanded customer numbers from 12 to more than 50 in the last 5 years.

CAS is also Scotland’s first software house, coming into existence as part of Heriot-Watt University in 1969. We celebrated our 50th birthday in 2019!

CAS is based on the Heriot-Watt Research Park to the West of Edinburgh.

CAS has two primary application areas:

• Case management, and our workflow product Workpro, which is used across many industries, with a significant presence in ombudsman organisations.
• Defence, where development is focused on our Electronic Warfare product, is used on military tactics ranges to provide a realistic training environment for air forces.

CAS is taking steps to improve diversity within our organisation, so if you’ve got the right skills for the job we want to hear from you. We encourage applications from the right candidates regardless of age, disability, gender identity, sexual orientation, religion, belief or race.

About our Culture

CAS is a product-based company

• We proudly own and develop Workpro. Unlike in other companies or roles, where you would complete a project, but then never see whether your work was useful and successful, here at CAS, we have the incredible opportunity to see how Workpro improves things for our customers, and how we change their lives for the better. We work closely with them to understand their pain points and frustrations and help them overcome them. As employee-owners, Workpro belongs to the team and the team takes pride in making it better for all – customers and staff alike.
• We use innovation and creativity to find ways to improve and enhance our product and to gradually advance it to the latest technologies, keeping our jobs interesting, challenging and our skills fresh.
• We also continue to support the legacy parts of the system and work with both older and newer technologies to maintain and, where possible, develop and extend it.
• We take ownership and pride in what we do. We recognise that when things work well it is because of excellent contributions from the team. When something works less well we take responsibility for this and work together to fix it.
• We work for the future, recognising that the work we do now, and may still be serving customers in 10 or more years.

CAS is a small company

• The company has a family feel and the team are supportive of each other.
• We don’t have a dedicated support team and therefore spend a small part of our time solving problems for customers and fixing bugs. The rest of the time we develop new features and improve the product.
• We organise team events regularly (our aim is one a month), and we encourage teams to have coffee breaks (online) or even play short games.
• We encourage you to develop your technical skills, but opportunities for promotion to management roles don’t come up often, as staff tend to stay in their roles for a long time.

A professional environment

• We are careful and considerate in our work and develop our code in a way that protects customers and is considerate of the long future of Workpro.
• We design implementations before we code them.
• We write technical documentation to support our code.
• We work as a team and with our teammates rather than on our own tasks.
• We never copy and paste code that we don’t take time to first understand.
• We acknowledge that bugs are expensive and we do our best to develop without bugs.

A learning environment 

• We provide time and resources for training.
• We give bonuses and promotions to people who learn the right skills.
• We have a structured learning and development path to support technical growth, from graduate to software architect.
• We look for developers who want to continue to develop and hone their skills, not just to stick with comfortable technologies.
• We enjoy learning and developing our understanding of both older and newer technologies.

 Team environment

• We always work as a team. We define our team strategies together and everyone plays their part to benefit the whole team.
• We respect and listen to each other.
• We consider the contributions and ideas of all, regardless of their level.
• We put the team’s needs above our own ambitions.

Flexible, remote-working environment 

• We work from home, but we can choose to use the office.
• Our core hours are from 10:00 to 16:00.  You can fit your working pattern around this.
• We support flexible working: for example, some of the teamwork compressed hours.
• We allow people to work abroad for short periods of time (assuming they have a suitable environment), enabling them to extend their trips and enjoy for longer a place, family or similar.

Duties

The Infrastructure Engineer will be based in our Infrastructure Team, which performs a variety of functions, including:

• Maintaining and developing CAS internal infrastructure services (i.e. our internal network, servers, user PCs, IT security, etc.)
• Providing effective IT support for the CAS business
• Working with customers to provide support and to assist with integration
• Working with our suppliers to support, maintain and develop our Workpro cloud infrastructure
• Ensuring and improving IT security
• Installing and supporting Workpro systems both in the cloud and on-premise

Our customer base is mostly in the UK, with a small number of non-UK customers. While most support work can be conducted remotely from our office, from time-to-time you will be required to travel to customer sites (no more than 10 times per year), and this may occasionally necessitate overnight stays (unlikely to be more than one or two of the maximum 10 trips).

Out-of-hours working and travel might occasionally be necessary to support customer roll-outs or to visit customer sites:

• We have a rota system where you will be able to gain extra days holiday in return for working evenings and weekends to perform routine maintenance activities
• You might also be required to work out of hours in the evenings and weekends to perform more specialist IT tasks. You will be compensated for this either with TOIL or paid overtime, depending on the nature of the work.
  
  

Technology

CAS use a Windows platform for our internal network and for our Workpro deployments.

Our cloud environment is built on Windows Server / ASP.Net / Microsoft SQL Server. Internally we use a mixture of internally hosted applications as well as Office 365 and Exchange Online.

We also support a cloud environment hosted in AWS.

Training and Development

The CAS IT team is developing a structured career path for infrastructure engineers. You will be set clear goals for progression and given access to training to support your development across all areas of infrastructure support, IT security, etc.

Qualifications

The Role

Essential Skills and experience

• Managing and supporting Active Directory
• Managing and administering Office 365
• A good understanding of networking
• A good understanding of virtualisation
• Building and supporting MS Windows desktops and servers
• Providing customer support
• Writing documentation for technical and non-technical audiences
• An aptitude for problem-solving, which you can apply to practical problems
• Good communication skills
• You are a team player

Desirable Skills

The following are all relevant, but training will be provided in all these areas if needed: 

• Any relevant certification (MS Windows / Office 365 / etc)
• Email systems administration
• Managing SQL Server
• Working with cloud-hosted systems, such as Azure and AWS
• Working with web servers (especially IIS)
• Working with firewalls/routers / VPNs
• Supporting client-server systems using the Microsoft .Net platform
• Powershell or other scripting languages
• Deployment technology

Development Plan

As you grow, you’ll pick up skills and experience which will allow you to take on more responsibilities.

After one month, we’d expect you to be:

• Triaging incoming helpdesk tickets and passing them to the relevant member of the Infrastructure Team.
• Performing daily checks of backups, AV, database volumes, AWS and PRTG dashboards and alerting the team of any issues
• Monthly reviews of vulnerability scans and patching requirements
• Monitoring PRTG and responding to alerts
• Making test copies of live Workpro systems so that upgrades can be tested
• Setting up new CAS users in Active Directory / Office 365 / etc; building PCs
• Spinning up new VMs and running up new deployments
• Collating Management Information for ISF meetings

After three months you will also:

• Manage server certificate renewals
• Manage internal application and desktop patching using PDQ
• Assist with customer issues
• Assist with new customer VPN set-up

After six months you’ll also:

• Handle some customer issues yourself
• Be responsible for ensuring patches are applied and vulnerabilities are addressed within the cloud environments we support (patching is done by our hosting partners – you will make sure they’re on top of it)
• Responsible for addressing issues raised by PRTG, either by fixing an issue or passing it to the appropriate team
• Manage new customer VPN set up
• Fix 2nd level tickets for internal CAS users
• Start providing out-of-hours cover
• Manage smaller projects (e.g. new customer set-up), with support from more experienced team members

After 12 months you’ll also:

• Fix 2nd level tickets for external customers
• At this point, we’ll start planning for the next phase of your development. There are numerous areas where you could take your skills: Microsoft Azure; AWS; managing SQL Server databases; networking; and so on.

What is Workpro Casework?

Workpro is an established case management tool, used across a range of industries including government organisations, financial services and human resources departments.

Organisations use Workpro to manage cases as part of business processes. For example in financial services, a case might be a complaint from a customer about service provided to them by the company.

Workpro supports case handlers by allowing them to: capture all relevant data about a case in one place: to easily create documents and emails relating to the case; manage their workload by creating tasks within the system and tracking their completion; and so on.

Separate teams within CAS:

• Design and engineer the core Workpro software product
• Create individual configurations of the product for customers to match their business processes
• Manage and support customer systems on-premise and our Workpro cloud platform

Most of our customers are UK based but we have a growing international customer base.

Company Benefits

• Develop your career in an established software company, with a structured career plan offering the chance for annual progression
• Own a stake in the company (after 6 months you will have an opportunity to own shares in the company)
• Profit-share scheme (available to all employees through our ownership structure)
• Work-life balance - flexible hours
• Complimentary tea, coffee, fruit, and biscuits, when in the office
• Hybrid working approach
• Excellent office location on the Heriot-Watt campus, with reduced rates for sports facilities within the university, and free parking, for those wishing to use it
• Company pension scheme
• Long-term sickness cover
• Cycle-to-work scheme