Do staff work remote or out of an office?

Approximately 95% of the time, the person would be working remotely, ideally out of their home office. A successful candidate will be disciplined, organized, and a self-starter able to work effectively with minimal guidance. The successful candidate would need to be able to construct an appropriate home office where they could work without interruption and where other family members understood that when you were there, you were working.

The farthest client drive time that ever happens from the Somers, WI location is 1 hour, which typically happens less than 5 times per year. Other travel would be Racine/Kenosha/Milwaukee area clients where an onsite visit is required to do work. Those appointments would typically be a full day or half day onsite. This is usually no more than one day per week.

The vast majority of work is done remotely.

The candidate is expected to maintain an appropriately sized internet connection at home that would facilitate them being able to work effectively. Efficiency and reliability of the work environment is very important. An appropriate connection would be a 100 mbps x 10 mbps or better wired (not wireless) Internet connection. Microwave connections and satellite connections are not reliable. The candidate would need a static IP address. The candidate would be required to use a QPC-controlled perimeter security appliance in order to achieve proper levels of network security.

What would you say QPC’s company sizzle is?

The work we do at QPC is meaningful and appreciated by our clientele. We build and maintain the systems that facilitate our clients’ businesses. Each engineer knows directly what their contribution is and gets the credit for it. When an engineer demonstrates competency and proficiency, they are rewarded with projects and training that give them an opportunity to expand their skills further. Unlike working at a very large company where a project may drag on for two or more years, the projects we typically deal with are 6 months in length or less. This gives the engineers the opportunity to work on a wide variety of systems, environments, technologies, and types of client businesses. QPC engineers are not bored or lacking for different things to work on.

The owners of the company are engineers, and as such have a vivid and accurate understanding of what it takes to do the job. We are people that other engineers respect working for.

What is the work schedule like?

QPC’s work schedule is typical of a person who is in a system engineer position. There is maintenance, project, break/fix, and support request work to do every day.

Our clients have very few emergencies requiring anything on an unplanned basis. Server patching work would typically be done on weekends as it would be in any environment.

This work is done remotely. Planned server maintenance done on weekends or evenings is handled as flex time and reduces the expected hours for the system engineer on the following week.

When onsite client visits are made, we expect an engineer to stay onsite at a client’s location until a problem is solved. If the problem is not solved by 5P, the engineer stays. It is not acceptable to pass the work off to someone else.

This position is not conducive for someone that has other obligations that would prevent them from staying until the job is complete.

While the engineer may be able to work from home, they are expected to be available during normal work hours at their desk when not at a client site.

We do not have an official on-call schedule. If the engineer for a client account sets a change window schedule with the client. They are expected to be able to provide support as-needed to that client if needed during that planned change window. The engineer usually has significant influence over when this change is occurring. This is much more flexible of an arrangement than most consulting firms and nearly all large companies.

What are the three main characteristics needed by a successful candidate?

The candidate must be 100% dedicated to following NIST SP-800 quality security protocols and IT security standards and best practices at all times.

The candidate must be a self-motivated individual that can drive tasks and projects to completion with minimal guidance.

The candidate must be very organized, disciplined, and have a high attention to detail. We are in consulting and accuracy is absolutely required.

Why would someone want to work at QPC?

A large company has silos and very tightly defined roles and responsibilities that rarely allow a single individual to work a project from start to finish inclusive of the phone system, servers, computers, email systems, WAN-facing DNS, NAS units, backup systems, physical access control, surveillance, data migrations, network design, implementation and support. At QPC, an engineer is expected to have or develop the skills to effectively engineer, implement, and support all of the systems and their integrations. It is a rare opportunity to be able to manage all of those systems in their entirety and benefit from the skills diversity that comes from that.

We believe in ongoing training. The engineer is expected to participate in monthly manufacturer training. A successful candidate will have a passion for IT systems such that they want to ensure that their home environment is properly securely hardened and maintained at all times. We facilitate the engineer to have access to this training material, but they are expected to spend their personal time developing the skills they need to be able to accomplish the work tasks effectively because those are the skills they need to do the job.

An engineer who successfully passes a certification exam that is registered to QPC may be eligible for exam fee reimbursement if the certification is one that we needed.