Application Support Tech Lead

Role purpose

Be the technical authority for a cluster of applications: lead knowledge acquisition during transition, resolve complex L3 issues, and drive modernization, consolidation and automation that lets a smaller team support more applications.

Key responsibilities

• Transition & knowledge acquisition
• Lead technical knowledge transfer for the assigned application cluster; validate understanding through reverse-shadow.
• Reverse-engineer and document undocumented applications: architecture, integrations, data flows, dependencies, deployment and recovery procedures.
• Verify environment access, source code, CI/CD pipelines, monitoring and DR readiness (RTO/RPO) before go-live.
• Technical leadership & L3 support
• Lead technical triage of incidents, defects and client tasks: estimation, assignment to engineers, technical review and closure.
• Own L3 resolution, root cause analysis and permanent fixes for recurring problems.
• Lead major incident technical bridges for Critical/High applications.
• Review code changes, deployments and change requests; enforce engineering and security standards.
• Define runbooks, monitoring/alerting standards and shift-left knowledge articles.
• Modernization, merging & innovation
• Assess applications technically (technical fit, debt, risk) to feed rationalization decisions.
• Design and lead solutions for merging overlapping applications, re-platforming (e.g., containerization on Kubernetes, serverless), upgrades (.NET Framework to .NET 8, Java versions) and SaaS migration.
• Build automation: self-healing scripts, synthetic monitoring, automated health checks, CI/CD improvements, AI-assisted triage.
• Evaluate and pilot new tools and GenAI capabilities that reduce support effort.

Team leadership

• Mentor engineers, drive cross-skilling so each engineer can support multiple applications.
• Plan work allocation, on-call rotas and technical capacity for the cluster.
• Required qualifications & skills
• Strong hands-on background in one or more of: .NET/.NET Core, Java, PHP, JavaScript (Angular/React).
• Solid cloud experience on AWS (EC2, ECS/EKS, Lambda, RDS, S3, CloudWatch); GCP or Azure a plus.
• Databases: SQL Server, MySQL, MongoDB – query tuning and troubleshooting.
• Experience with Kubernetes/containers, CI/CD (GitHub/GitLab/Azure DevOps/Jenkins) and Infrastructure as Code (Terraform/CloudFormation).
• Proven delivery of application modernization or consolidation projects.
• Strong RCA/problem management skills and ITIL-aligned ways of working in ServiceNow.
• Nice to have
• AWS Solutions Architect / Kubernetes (CKA/CKAD) certifications.
• Experience with integrations/APIs, middleware, SaaS platforms (e.g., Shopify, DocuSign) and COTS.
• Observability (Datadog, Dynatrace, New Relic, Splunk) and scripting (Python, PowerShell, Bash).
• Experience taking over applications from another vendor.
• Core competencies
• Ownership mindset and calm under pressure in high-impact incidents.
• Fast learner able to support many applications with varied technologies.
• Clear written and verbal communication in English with business and technical stakeholders.
• Continuous-improvement and automation-first thinking.