Industrial Placement

About us:

We’re a friendly team of experts, optimists, big-thinkers and problem-solvers, and are lucky enough to work with some of the largest and most successful companies in the world.
myairops is a leader of SaaS products to the aviation industry with customers across the globe with diverse challenges including corporate flight departments, brokers, medical providers, military and business aviation operators. Solutions are provided through innovative web delivered software and connected mobile applications. 

The placement:
We’ve seen great success with providing the opportunity for industrial placement students to work on software projects that build on their experience and understanding, but also help enhance our products. We have found that it has been particularly beneficial for students to work together throughout the life cycle of the project, with regular support from mentors across the development team. For we will be following the same format, offering two industrial placement opportunities. The aim for the year will be to complete two projects, one within the Product Team and one within the Customer Success Team. Throughout the process we will offer help and support by pairing you with a member of our team who can assist day to day with achieving delivery goals and learning objectives.
To give an indication of the type of project that may be available, we have outlined some potential projects below: Designing A Customer Portal: This project would involve the designing and building of a data and analytics portal that can be accessed by an end customer. We already have many of these capabilities but we want to experiment with new technolgies and approaches. This will allow access to key information without the customer needing to be a full user of the product. Enhancing examples of how apps can be built around our API ecosystem: The myairops products have a number of APIs that allow custom apps and integrations to be built around our products. Some of our customers do not have the in-house capabilities to build those apps and so we will create apps and example projects that our customers can use to bootstrap their own needs. Drive Customer Engagement: This project would involve increasing the amount of regular positive engagement with existing customers, including developing the way we communicate about new features and support our users. This would involve designing and sending out quarterly customer newsletters, release notes and customer case-studies. Also improving the quality of customer self-help resources by creating engaging and easy to follow self-help resources (videos & KB articles). This project would also include designing an automated solution that updates our customers monthly regarding their support tickets and activity. How could this placement benefit you?
You will gain experience in a commercial environment that is using the latest Agile software engineering processes and techniques. You will be exposed to the compromises and day-to-day challenges that demonstrate the application of Agile theory, is not always as clean as the authors of the leading blogs and publications describe. The technology that is used within the business is contemporary, offering exposure to the latest Cloud infrastructure, architectural patterns (such as microservices), mobile app development using Xamarin and programming languages such as C# .NET and JavaScript with the latest versions of Angular. We are also looking at projects involving genetic algorithms and predictive analytics. We have exciting projects as well looking at the machine learning and AI capabilities within Microsoft Azure so there is the ability to apply your passion in a commercial context.

You will be assigned to work with an experienced member of the team, so you will always have guidance and support. We put the emphasis on working together and measure success in terms of the output of the team and not the individual. Whilst working for us you will also gain knowledge and working understanding of the process of inside sales, digital marketing, platform integration and business operations all in an exciting market vertical of the Aviation sector.

What exposure will you gain to processes, tools and techniques?

During your rotation, or your decision to specialise in one given area, you will expect to gain an understanding of:
Agile software engineering – where terms like “stand-ups”, “sprints”, “backlogs”, “t-shirt sizing”, “features”, “epics”, “story points”, definitions of “done” and “ready”; as well as “user stories” will all become part of your vocabulary. You will learn how delivering business value to customers and being able to react quickly to feature requests and changes in the market are key to success.
Product management and product ownership – understanding competitor offerings, pricing strategies, product roadmaps and the curation of product backlogs including bug triage.
Estimation – through different forms and techniques including affinity sizing and team collaboration through “planning poker” and negotiation.
Software development – developing code in C# and JavaScript.
DevOps – understanding the role and tooling of DevOps, Continuous Integration, Continuous Deployment and why it is important to be able to deliver changes quickly and reliably to our customers all within our cloud context.
Test automation – using web drivers and JavaScript libraries.
Architecture and design – whilst it is always our goal to build features and put them in the hands of our customers for feedback; being able to express ideas and design concepts is vital. You will learn about design patterns and using design languages including UML and BPMN.
Wireframing and UI/UX design – building user interfaces that users find intuitive and easy to use is key in any software project. You will learn about the role of User Interface and User Experience design and the ability to rapidly prototype using wireframes and customer interactive feedback utilising Balsamiq and Invision
Talking to our customers - understanding what makes a difference to their business and helping bridge the gap between the customer terminology and business process to the specification used by our engineers to deliver the solution.
The importance of building a strong team ethos -  where effective communication is key. Through this you will gain insight to how personal achievement is measured through the success of the team.
Digital marketing and communications – using technologies like Hubspot for CRM, Wordpress for CMS, and social channels to inform our customers and attract prospects. You will gain knowledge of marketing campaigns, visitor tracking, SEO and web development as we build out our website and e-commerce platform.
Lastly - The artistry and wit of memes

Roles across the team
Joining myairops means joining a team of hugely talented individuals on a variety of different career paths. Throughout your placement you will have the opportunity to learn from them, via shadowing or coaching sessions, or even just via Q&A, which will give you exposure to many roles within the team. We have included below a number of the roles that make up the myairops Product and Customer Success teams:

Full-stack Software Engineer – encompassing front-end and back-end development with knowledge of the operating systems, cloud infrastructure, platforms, build environments and database design.
Product owner – defining and specifying the work that is to be performed through the medium of user stories and wireframing. A bridging role between our customers and our engineering team the product owner translates customer requirements to product backlog items and prioritises work on the roadmap.
UI Specialist – specialising in the UI aspects of software development using UI frameworks, toolkits and libraries. Gain experience with the latest HTML standards and styling utilising CSS and associated technologies with knowledge of the browser ecosystem and Document Object Model (DOM) and Scaled Vector Graphics (SVG) rendering and dynamic manipulation.
QA Automation Engineer – specialising in testing software using automated tools and techniques this role also utilises extensive code development, using JavaScript, and knowledge of browser rendering and interaction. You will learn the key aspects of bug triage and classification, fuzzing, edge case testing and security vulnerability detection.
DevOps Engineer – offering the ability to learn some of the latest techniques in Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Deployment (CD). Learning build tooling and deployment technologies including package management, build pipelines, app services and containerisation (using Docker and Kubernetes)
Data Engineer – Develop your understanding and ability to improve data pipelines and assist with data integrity tasks. You will support the building and development of software for mass data injection and mass data update, and gain experience in developing data sets and using large data sets to tackle business issues.
Software Support Analyst – As a Software Support Analyst, you will provide primary technical support to customers and this role will help introduce the core concepts necessary to further your learning at myairops and the industry in general. By assisting both end-users and software developers, you will be involved with report writing, troubleshooting software and identifying root causes that will help develop SQL/database knowledge and problem solving skills. · Customer Support Engineer – providing outstanding technical support to myairops customers, to help them with advice and guidance regarding incidents, bugs and requests.
Solutions Consultant – being a trusted Subject Matter Expert to an assigned set of myairops customers, guiding through onboarding and beyond, to ensure the best experience of the myairops platform. This includes customer check-in meetings, consultancy meetings and delivering training.

Our Processes, Technologies and Tooling
· Agile Scrum
· Microsoft Azure PaaS and IaaS technologies
· MVC, Web forms and SPA web apps
· Mobile application development across Android and iOS (Xamarin, Swift Native)
· GIT and Microsoft DevOps
· C# .NET, JavaScript/TypeScript (predominantly Angular 2.0+)
· Test automation
· PowerBI / SSRS
· SQL Server/Azure SQL
· And many more…
Location: The role will be based in the ASL main office at Farnborough, Hampshire.

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