Senior Application Engineer

An opportunity for a full-time office-based application engineer in a senior role at Peninsula Business Services, on-site at our headquarters in Manchester, supporting a global business with operations in the UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. 

The Role

To take technical responsibility for the operation and modernisation of Peninsula’s finance and HR systems, working in the Data Team, alongside our in-house Development Team and third-party technology suppliers across the globe.   We seek technical experts with:

• Substantial experience of developing solutions, data pipelines and systems integrations in both legacy and contemporary technologies using the Microsoft stack.
• A proven track record working with finance professionals, systems, processes and data.
• A history of liaising with stakeholders at the highest level in international corporate businesses.

Reporting to the Associate Director of Data & Systems Engineering, this role is for a candidate willing and able to develop and implement solutions, troubleshoot existing deployments and manage technical debt, whilst providing technical leadership in future systems design, architecture and strategy.  

The Challenge

The right candidate should expect a long-term engagement to deliver a multi-year programme of transformation of finance and HR systems for an international consultancy business with recurring annual revenues approaching £500M.

Accountability

Key internal stakeholders in the Finance and ICT divisions include:

• Group Chief Technical Officer
• Group Chief Financial Officer
• Director of Group Finance
• Associate Director – Group Credit
• Group Financial Controller
• Head of IT Service Delivery
• Head of Infrastructure

The role also includes technical liaison with existing third-party vendors.

Applications

The PBSG Finance division has a suite of applications provided by The Access Group (TAG) which have been integrated into several proprietary applications and data integrations built in-house.    Our environment includes:

• Dimensions v2, an accountancy package built on a Microsoft SQL Server back end.
• FocalPoint, a workflow management tool used for managing the sequence of approvals and sign-off for purchasing.
• Orbis Task Centre, a scheduling tool used to generate invoices, credit notes and alerts, sourcing data from MS SQL Server, using Crystal Reports for managing report templates.
• Access Document Management (ADM), a document repository used for the storage and retrieval of invoices & credit notes.
• People XD, an HR platform used to manage personnel and payroll.
• Access aCloud, a self-serve expenses management platform.

The Dimensions platform also supports external integrations with the banking system, with Direct Debit collections being the most significant.

The Senior Application Engineer is responsible for these systems, for collaborating with our Infrastructure and Data teams to manage the servers and databases they rely upon and for liaising with third-party support personnel.

Systems Integrations

Several of our in-house applications are integrated with these applications, for posting invoices and credit notes, for writing back account and transaction data to contract management, collections and CRM applications and for pipelining data to our data warehouses for reporting.

As a Senior Application Engineer, you will take ownership of these systems, working with our in-house teams in upgrading, streamlining and troubleshooting, supported by our data engineers.

Strategy

We seek to modernise our core systems.   Our strategy is to move from on-prem, self-hosted solutions to fully cloud-based SaaS equivalents for all our operations globally within the next two years.

Providing guidance and support to the most senior stakeholders in the business is critical to this agenda.  Identifying solutions, defining requirements and selecting vendors is a core responsibility in becoming the primary source of technical expertise for Finance, globally.