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Nstein Technologies (TSX-V: EIN) develops and markets leading-edge content management software solutions, digital assets management, picture management and text mining solutions for the media and publishing industry. The head office is based in Montreal, Canada, with offices in the United States, London, Toulouse and Paris. For additional information, visit: www.nstein.com.

Picdar, an Nstein company, develops and implements its publishing workflow and content management solutions for an exciting range of customers including most national newspapers, leading magazines, travel companies and other large and small businesses. Some of these systems are enterprise-scale, handling huge numbers of assets, users and asset formats with sophisticated security and classification requirements.

Our software is developed at our St Albans base by the development team, using a variety of technologies and languages including Java/J2E and C++. Integration with third party software is important in most solutions, including Adobe Creative Suite and Quark on the desktop, and search engines (Autonomy, Lucene) and RDBMS (Oracle, Sequel Server) on the server. The Customer Care, Solutions Engineer and Development teams work closely together within the Engineering group.

This is a hugely varied, demanding and interesting role within our Customer Care Team, which has a reputation for personal and responsive customer service across a spectrum of dynamic industries. We are looking for a bright, dynamic person to join the team of engineers.

The CCEs are responsible for:

• Delivering high quality customer support for both urgent and non-urgent support issues. Support involves taking support calls from customers, and following these calls through to resolution. This requires analysis of the problem, where possible creating a fix or workaround, or working with others (eg our development team and our project managers) to provide and deploy a solution. Some of these are short term, easily fixed problems. Many are longer term in nature and are challenging. Support is provided by remote access to customer sites. Most problems we deal with are software or systems related. Hardware support is delivered by third parties but we often need to diagnose the faults.
• Planning and implementing software installations and upgrades, both as part of customer projects and as a result of support issues. Customer Care and Development engineers work together to ensure a smooth handover of deliverables for installation. Most installation work is carried out at Nstein UK offices or by remote connection to customer sites, but there is the opportunity to visit customer sites. The work is varied as system environments and configurations vary.
• Support of hosted operations. We provide syndication systems for a number of key customers and in some cases support data transfers between the hosted systems from customer internal systems.
• Support for in-house systems and infrastructure. This includes desktop and server hardware, a number of business systems, networking infrastructure, and business software and systems.

The role is very hands-on and varied, with a good mix of projects and urgent responsive work.

 

TECHNICAL SKILLS:

Customer Care Engineers will develop their skills in the following areas, and therefore familiarity and experience with most of these areas is required, the extent depending on seniority:

• Up to 5 years experience in a support/technical services environment handling reactive support issues and with a focus on applications software.
• Unix (Various, primarily Linux and Solaris) (Essential for experienced engineers, training will be provided for less experienced recruits.)
• MS Server (Nice to have)
• TCP/IP networking, TAs and routers, VPN and Firewalls
• PC (Win2k, XP, Windows Server 2003, Vista) and Apple Macintosh configuration
• Mass-storage devices - RAID, NAS, SAN, DLT drives etc
• Databases (Oracle, Sequel Server, Postgres)
• HTTP, Apache, J2E
• System configuration, administration and scripting

Training is provided where necessary, both “on the job” and through formal training courses.

We provide 24 by 7 on-call support. The successful candidate will be expected to join this rota in due course (probably after 6 months to 1 year) once they have sufficient experience to operate on their own.

 

PERSONAL SKILLS:

• Team player
• Enjoy a stimulating, pressurised environment
• Good communication and interpersonal skills, on the phone and face to face
• Disciplined and well organised
• Lateral thinker and good problem solving skills
• Driving: while the job is office based, some travel (eg for installs) is required so the successful candidate will probably hold a full driving licence.
• In order to operate on the on-call rota, the candidate will need to live within a maximum of an hour’s drive from St Albans, and ideally less.

 

This role offers considerable opportunities for career development within the Customer Care Team and elsewhere in the organization.