R&D Placement Student

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About Clearswift

Clearswift is trusted by organisations globally to protect their critical information, giving them the freedom to securely collaborate and drive business growth. Our unique technology supports a straightforward and ‘adaptive’ data loss prevention solution, avoiding the risk of business interruption and enabling organisations to have 100% visibility of their critical information 100% of the time.

Clearswift’s solutions are built on an innovative content-aware inspection engine that will protect an organization and its employees. Managed by a single, shared policy centre the solutions minimize administrative burden while allowing your business to use the latest technologies safely and securely.

Clearswift Values

Show passion in what we do, drive for innovation in everything we do and continuously collaborate to make a difference.

R&D Placement Student

This is a 13 month industrial placement within Clearswift’s R&D department. During this placement the successful candidate will spend their time supporting the development and maintenance of Clearswift’s product range.

The role will provide an opportunity to gain exposure to the broad range of IT based activities that can be experienced within a software engineering department. These activities will include software development and verification of new product features and patches, as well as assisting in the expansion and maintenance of the department’s physical and virtual infrastructure.

The role is relatively flexible in approach and tasks will be assigned based on the student’s aptitude. Over the course of the year this will allow the student the opportunity to develop a number of skills by focusing on areas that are felt to be most appropriate to their future career.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, development and maintenance of features used within the product suite.
• Test design and planning to ensure the quality of product suite.
• Developing tools to support the maintenance of the product suite.
• Assisting in the verification of product releases as required.
• Assisting in the maintenance and expansion of the department’s infrastructure.
• Cross (Scrum) team collaboration to provide support to other projects and to develop and align best engineering (automated) practices

Skills Profile

• A passion for software development and a desire for a career in software engineering
• Desire to engage with the variety of team activities
• Good documentation, communication and collaboration skills
• Programming experience using C++, Java, C#, Bash, Python, Perl, Selenium
• Familiarity with OS’s and prevalent variants of Microsoft Windows, Linux, and Browsers
• Attention to detail with analytic, diagnostic and troubleshooting skills

Qualifications

• 3 ‘A’ Levels at Grade C or above
• Good examination track record and on target for a 2ii or above

The job is located at our offices in Theale, Reading, Berkshire.

The placement will start on 1st July 2017 and finish on 31st July 2018.

Teams

Please find below the three teams that are recruiting for a Placement Student.

Platform Team

The role within the Platform team is a unique one compared to other placement roles. We are responsible for the Operating System of all our products and the building of open-source software packages and libraries that may be needed by upper layers. All the work we do is at the command line, so there is no fancy IDE which can help you debug any problems, you have to find solutions yourself which can be challenging but in the end really rewarding. The main scripting language used within platform layer is bash, but there is the occasional use of python.

As a member of the Platform team you will be expected to contribute as any other employee, this is what’s great about working at Clearswift, you will be given real work that will impact the final product from day one. By working in the platform team you will be able to work on a wide range of problems, which will improve your knowledge of the core requirements that are needed to make a system work.

Engine Team

One of the things that sets Clearswift apart from the competition is the engine which sits at the core of all products and enables Deep-Content Analysis on most file formats that we handle. It does this using a method of data decomposition which breaks down a file into its constituent elements, allowing each section to be analysed and possibly removed or ‘sanitised’ before rebuilding the entire file.

As a developer in the engine team you will find yourself needing a few key traits in order to thrive and make the most out of the opportunity. The ability to breakdown a large problem into more manageable chunks definitely helps to keep your sanity intact but above all a passion for learning and the enthusiasm to become a better programmer will be more important than any knowledge you have. You can teach a concept or a language, you can’t teach passion and drive to learn.

An aptitude for Object Oriented systems is invaluable as most of the 500K lines of code in the engine are Object Oriented C++ for developers and some Java for testers. Creating large systems with a language like C++ combines low-level file manipulation in a high-level architecture to create an incredibly tailored system which is efficient, maintainable, and staying in-line with Clearswift’s concept for adaptation, is easily scalable.

Engineering Response Team

The main function of The ERT (Engineering Response Team) is to support and maintain our products throughout their lifetime once they have been released, this is done through close collaboration with our support team by responding to customer raised defect reports and enhancement requests. As it is possible for required changes to come from anywhere within our wide product base, working with the ERT will give you the opportunity to immerse yourself in a wide range of different languages and technologies and apply these to a wide range of problems. Due to the broad nature of the team you’ll find that you’ll need to be able to quickly adapt to new challenges and have an eagerness to be constantly learning. By the end of your placement your hard work will have been rewarded with a vastly expanded knowledge base and the ability to easily pick up anything new which is thrown at you.

How to apply

To apply for this role and to find out more, please click on the apply button below.