Lead, Application Support

Lead, Application Support

The Lead, Application Support is responsible for the day-to-day execution, accountability, and operational health of Product Support. This role is hands-on, metrics-driven, and escalation-focused, ensuring customer-impacting issues are responded to quickly, owned clearly, and driven to resolution without stagnation.

This role directly addresses support response gaps, escalation delays, and incident ownership clarity by enforcing disciplined support operations, strengthening cross-functional coordination, and ensuring consistent communication with both customers and internal stakeholders.

The ideal candidate combines technical depth, people leadership, and operational rigor, with a bias toward action, urgency, and accountability.

Essential Job Functions:

Support Operations & Incident Management

• Own daily operational execution of Product Support, including ticket flow, prioritization, response times, and escalations
• Ensure all support tickets are actively worked, reviewed daily, and never left idle or stagnant
• Act as the primary owner for customer-facing production incidents, from intake through resolution and follow-up
• Enforce clear incident ownership, escalation paths, and handoffs during high-severity events
• Partner closely with DevOps, Engineering, Security, and Product during incidents to ensure fast triage and coordinated resolution
• Ensure post-incident documentation (RCA inputs, timelines, resolution notes) is accurate, complete, and timely

Escalation & Customer Advocacy

• Serve as the first line of leadership escalation for customer-impacting issues
• Proactively identify and surface at-risk customers or recurring pain points
• Act as a strong internal advocate for the customer, ensuring urgency and clarity during outages or degradations
• Ensure clear, timely, and professional communication to customers during incidents and escalations

Metrics, Accountability & Continuous Improvement

• Track and actively manage key support metrics including: response time, time to resolution, ticket aging, escalation volume, severity trends
• Identify and address systemic support issues, including tooling gaps, process breakdowns, or resourcing constraints
• Use data to drive process improvements, staffing discussions, and tooling enhancements
• Partner with leadership to ensure support performance meets internal SLAs and customer expectations

Team Leadership & Development

• Lead, coach, and develop Product Support team members with clear expectations and accountability
• Reinforce a culture of urgency, ownership, and professionalism
• Ensure team members are properly trained on: product functionality, support processes, escalation procedures, incident handling expectations
• Conduct regular 1:1s, performance feedback, and development planning
• Ensure on-call readiness and support coverage expectations are met

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Work closely with Engineering and Product to: identify recurring defects or gaps, improve handoff between support and development, influence product improvements based on customer-facing issues
• Partner with Technical Support leadership on process alignment and tooling
• Ensure support learning is fed back into roadmap, documentation, and training

After-Hours & On-Call Support

• Participate in and/or support after-hours escalation as needed
• Ensure on-call processes are followed and escalations are handled correctly
• Step in when unresolved issues require management intervention

Education and Experience:

Note: Qualifications listed are guidelines. Other factors may be considered.

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, Information Systems, or equivalent experience
• 5+ years of experience in technical or product support roles
• 2+ years of people management or team lead experience
• Strong background in: system-level troubleshooting, web services and APIs (REST/SOAP), service-oriented architectures
• Experience working closely with DevOps and Engineering teams during incidents
• Supply chain or logistics domain experience a plus

Technical Skills

• Experience supporting Java and/or .NET-based systems
• Familiarity with SQL, XML, JSON
• API testing and troubleshooting (Postman required)
• Understanding of SDLC and CI/CD concepts

Experience working with incident tracking and CRM systems

Key Skills & Attributes:

• Strong sense of ownership and urgency
• Clear, concise communicator—especially during incidents
• Ability to hold teams accountable while remaining supportive
• Highly organized and detail-oriented
• Comfortable operating in high-pressure, customer-impacting situations
• Naturally collaborative across engineering, product, and operations
• Bias toward action and continuous improvement
• Calm, structured decision-maker during outages or escalations