Application Support Lead

JOB OVERVIEW

The Application Support Lead is a pivotal role responsible for the stability, availability, and performance of the Institute's crown jewel business applications. Working from the Offshore Delivery Center, this role provides advanced (L3) application support for mission-critical systems supporting international locations. The role owns end-to-end application support, major incident management, and acts as a trusted liaison between business stakeholders, onshore IT teams, and development partners to ensure minimal disruption and high service quality.

ESSENTIAL DUTIES AND RESPONSIBILITIES

· Lead and manage all aspects of application support for crown jewel, business-critical applications.

· Provide L3 support and act as the primary escalation point for complex incidents.

· Own Major Incident Management including bridge coordination, communications, and Root Cause Analysis.

· Collaborate with development, infrastructure, database, network, and security teams to resolve issues.

· Ensure proactive monitoring of application availability and performance.

· Manage ServiceNow queues ensuring SLA compliance and prioritization.

· Support application releases, deployments, patching, and planned outages.

· Validate applications post server and infrastructure patching.

· Support Disaster Recovery (DR) and Business Continuity Planning (BCP) activities.

· Ensure compliance with information security, data privacy, and regulatory requirements.

· Maintain runbooks, SOPs, and application documentation.

· Participate in on-call and extended global support coverage.

· Perform other duties as assigned.

TECHNICAL COMPETENCIES (Knowledge, Skills & Abilities)

· Strong understanding of Incident, Problem, Major Incident, and Escalation Management in enterprise IT environments.

· Strong ownership mindset with ability to become Subject Matter Expert (SME).

· Extensive experience supporting Java-based, n-tier and client-server applications.

· Strong relational database experience including Oracle and SQL Server.

· Ability to analyze application and system logs to perform root cause analysis.

· Experience with APIs, integrations, and middleware technologies.

· Working knowledge of Windows and Linux server environments.

· Understanding of networking concepts such as DNS, HTTPS, proxies, and load balancers.

· Strong analytical, problem-solving, and troubleshooting skills.

· Excellent written and verbal communication skills.

· Ability to work in a global 24x7 support environment.

· Excellent written and verbal communication skills with ability to collaborate across technical and business teams.

· Strong decision-making ability, ability to work independently, and capability to manage multiple priorities under pressure.

EDUCATION AND EXPERIENCE

· Associates Degree in Computer Science, or equivalent experience in related field, and 7+ years of related experience. Bachelor's degree preferred.

· Experience of working in a high-pressure environment preferably Front office application support and being able to deliver to tight deadlines.

· Good working knowledge of application integration, testing and working with APIs.

· Experience of any OOPs language (C++/Java) and scripting like Perl/Python/Powershell.

· Experience of working on a n-tier architecture and complex systems.

· Strong experience working with relational databases. Querying, scripting experience with SQL server Oracle Database preferred.

Certifications preferred:

Java Certification (Oracle Certified Java Programmer – OCPJP)

Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Foundation (Preferred)

DevOps Foundation Certification (Preferred)

Oracle Certified Professional (OCP) or Oracle Database SQL Certification (Preferred)