Application Support Engineer

Job Title: Application Support Engineer

Location: Newark, NJ – Hybrid (3 days onsite per week)

Duration: 12 months (contract to Perm Hire)

About Role:

We are seeking an experienced Application Support Engineer to manage and enhance the stability, performance and availability of our client facing applications. This role requires a proactive leader who can guide a dedicated support team, collaborate with engineering teams, and effectively manage incidents to minimize downtime, improve user experience and communicate with stakeholders.

Key Responsibilities:

Incident Management and Resolution:

• Oversee the triage, investigation and resolution of production issues, ensuring timely communication and status updates.
• Manage incident response efforts, including documentation and root cause analysis and post-incident reviews to identify preventative actions.
• Establish clear escalation protocols and ensure adherence to serve level agreements (SLAs).
• Coordinate resolution and follow ups with dependencies outside immediate team.
• Coordinate KTs between development teams and L1/L2 triage to establish runbooks and knowledge base Team Leadership and Coordination.
• Coordinate with development, QA, and infrastructure teams to ensure seamless issue resolution and knowledge sharing.
• Foster a strong ownership mindset within the team, ensuring accountability for system health and stability.

Monitoring and Alerting:

• Define and maintain effective monitoring solutions in partnership with development teams to proactively identify and address potential issues.
• Continuously improve observability by implementing dashboards, alerts and automated health checks in partnership with development teams Process and Documentation.
• Develop and maintain detailed runbooks, SOPs and knowledge base articles to ensure consistent response procedures.
• Establish best practices for incident response, including communication templates and decision frameworks.

Stakeholder Communication:

• Serve as the primary point of contact for production issues affecting client experiences
• Provide clear, concise updates to leadership, internal teams and clients during incidents and post-incident reviews.

Continuous Improvement:

• Identify patterns in recurring incidents and partner with development teams to implement permanent fixes.
• Drive initiatives to enhance system reliability, scalability, and performance.

Qualifications and Skills:

• Proven experience in a production support leadership role for client facing applications.
• Strong understanding of incident management frameworks.
• Proficiency in troubleshooting application, database, and infrastructure issues.
• Familiarity with monitoring tools such Dynatrace, Datadog , Splunk etc.
• Familiarity with incident management platforms such as ServiceNow.
• Ability to prioritize tasks effectively, and communicate technical concepts to non technical stakeholders
• Excellent problem solving skills and a calm, solution-focused approach under pressure.
• Experience working in AWS
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines and release management processes

Preferred:

• Background in software development or scripting for automation.
• Previous experience in the financial services industry Success Metrics
• MTTA: Mean time to acknowledge
• MTTR: Mean time to resolve
• Stakeholder satisfaction with incident communication
• Knowledge base usage rate and coverage
• Number of issues handed over to L1/L2, EMKT teams
• Measure # of system identified vs user reported alerts and trends over time
• Enhancements and alerts requested
• Minimize # of user reported incidents
• Measure incidents resolved with L1/L2 without app support team
• Reduction in resolution times due to documented processes