Applications and Systems Support Engineer - remote

What We Are Looking For/What You Will Be Doing

We are looking for a talented applications and systems support engineer who is interested in becoming a full-time employee. The role is either 100% remote with occasional visits to our home office, or on-site in Davis, California (Either way the role will start 100% remote due to Covid). For remote positions we do not have a set requirement for periodic onsite visits, and this can be discussed during the hiring process.

The development team consists of local developers and remote developers. Many of our consultants and representatives (Veterinarians or Veterinary Technicians) are remote as well, and you will be collaborating with them daily.

We are primarily an ASP.NET/C# Web Forms shop, with some legacy Perl and ASP code, but we are making the transition to ASP.NET/C# MVC/Angular/Nodejs. Some of the tools that we use are Visual Studio 2019, Microsoft TFS, SQL Server, Slack, Zoom, F5, Rundeck and Ansible.

It is important to note that VIN is mostly a flat development organization. You will have a manager, but expect to be interacting with our fearless leader, Paul, one of the co-founders of VIN.

We have a strong and growing software Development, QA and DevOps team, and we’re looking for a Support Engineer with solid software engineering background to join us and take us to the next level. In this role, you will work very closely and daily with the engineering team and to ensure our constantly changing software application environments are stable and in line with expectations. You will help keep the platform running, track and resolve incidents, identify recurring incidents, and participate in coordinating deployment of releases and hotfixes in our test, staging, and production environments.

You will be the pioneer of Application Support at Veterinary Information Network (you will be our first application support hire!). You will be telling us what we are doing right and what we are doing wrong from an operational perspective. As the sole member of our Application Support team it will be your responsibility to:

-  Support our application software stack based on Net, .Net core, Asp.net webforms, Nodejs, Angular and Perl. Apply software or system changes to environments and using our automated process or manually in certain cases if needed.

-  Work closely with the software engineering team (QA, Dev, DevOps) and Infrastructure team to support our Production, Staging and Test environments

-  Report outages to teams and escalate issues when appropriate, lead resolution calls and participate in on-call support.

-  Identify and document our application operations, maintain SLA (Service Level Agreements), report and follow up regarding anomalies, incidents, and problems.

-  Work closely with the software engineering teams including Dev, QA teams to understand functional and system requirements.

-  Work closely with the DevOps team to ensure software is delivered per expectations to environments, participate in hotfix and release deployment coordination using deployment platform (based on Rundeck, Ansible, PRTG and TFS) .

-  Setup and maintain our monitoring platform (currently using a 3rd-party elastic stack platform), maintain our morning checks,  design, support and participate in the implementation of monitoring  scripts using technologies such as PowerShell, python, shell or ansible yaml scripts.

This cannot be stressed enough: you will need to have excellent communication skills (both verbal and written), be self-motivated, and have a team and user-first mentality. You are the type of person that follows up on incidents, problems and requests, doesn’t let things slip through the cracks, you have a knack for attention to detail and, above all, is a team player.

Down the road and depending on the software engineering team needs and candidate experience, skills and interests, the role may evolve to more responsibilities for example in Development or DevOps.

Requirements:

• 1+ year experience supporting software applications
• 3+ year work experience
• Bachelor’s Degree in Information Systems
• Software engineering background with experience with several of the following technologies: .NET, ASP.NET, Nodejs, F5, IIS, NGINX, SQLServer, Windows Server 2019, Linux CentOS/RedHat, Selenium, Solr, ETL
• Capacity to work and follow up on multiple topics daily, comfortable re-prioritizing activities multiple time daily based on user needs and directions from management.
• Excellent Analytical and problem-solving skills, Team first mentality, Project management skills, ability to successfully manage multiple tasks at any given point, strong relationship building skills &communication skills
• Be a self-starter, end-user driven
• Flexibility –responsibilities may require occasional evening and weekend work
• You must be legally authorized to work in the United States.

Nice to have:

• Working experience of ITIL, knowledge of ITIL for incident and problem management
• Experience with the following tools or technologies: F5, IIS, NGINX, SQL Server, Windows Server 2019, Linux RedHat, Kibana, Selenium, VMWare, Solr, ETL, Rundeck, Ansible, TFS

Hiring Process

We do not want to waste your time, which is why we would like for you to understand our hiring process. You will be notified after each stage if you will be moving forward in the hiring process.

• Complete an online survey where we can sort out things like salary requirements, how you would react in certain situations, etc.
• Complete a test with more advanced questions –we will provide a document with questions to respond to.
• Complete a brief phone interview with the software engineering team leads (approximately 15-30 minutes long).
• Complete a brief phone interview with Paul (our leader and co-founder of VIN), Nic (DevOps lead) and Cris (Dev team manager) (approximately 15-30 minutes long).
• Complete a phone/video interview with the dev team (up to 60 minutes long).

Current Benefits

• A competitive salary.
• VIN pays 100% of employee-only company sponsored health insurance premiums, including medical, dental, and vision.
• Currently, through a third-party administrator, VIN reimburses a portion of deductible-only expenses for both employee-only and those with dependents.
• 401k eligibility begins on the 91st day of full-time employment: there is a dollar for dollar match, of VIN earnings, up to 6% per pay period (bi-weekly) - e.g., if the employee contributes 1%, the match is 1%.
• PTO accrues from date of hire, but is not eligible to be used until the 91st day of full-time employment. Sick time accrues at 2.66 hours per pay period, personal time accrues at 0.33 hours per pay period and vacation time accrues at 3.33 hours per pay period, and increases based on tenure.
• 9 paid holidays (you are not eligible for holiday pay within the first two weeks of employment) This is in addition to your PTO accrual!

What you need to do:

This part is important, please follow these instructions or we will not be able to move you forward in the hiring process.

Please respond with a copy of your resume and a cover letter. Be creative and tell us why you would be the perfect candidate for this position. If we like what we see, you will be receiving an email survey to kick things off.

If you are a consulting agency, please do not submit your candidates to us, they will be ignored.

Thank you for your interest in Veterinary Information Network!