Applications Support and Administration Specialist

Role: Applications Support and Administration Specialist

Location: Canada, Remote

Full Time

Position Summary

Business Applications Support and Administration Specialist to manage and support a portfolio of applications that are primarily operated by business teams but require IT involvement for configuration, integration, maintenance, security, upgrades, and technical troubleshooting.

The resource will act as the primary liaison between business application owners, IT teams, software vendors, infrastructure teams, and security teams. The role will ensure that applications remain stable, secure, compliant, and aligned with business requirements.

The application portfolio may include platforms such as:

• OneTrust
• Jetty-based applications
• CRAFT AMS
• Optimizely, formerly Episerver
• Other commercial off-the-shelf, SaaS, web-based, and internally hosted applications

Key Responsibilities

Application Administration and Configuration

• Provide day-to-day administration and technical support for assigned business applications.
• Implement configuration changes based on approved business requirements.
• Manage application settings, workflows, forms, templates, business rules, notifications, and user preferences.
• Support user access provisioning, role configuration, permission management, and periodic access reviews.
• Maintain application environments, including development, test, staging, and production, where applicable.
• Ensure configuration changes are properly documented, tested, approved, and deployed through established change-management processes.

Application Maintenance and Operations

• Take ownership of application maintenance activities, including patching, upgrades, certificate renewals, license management, and environment health checks.
• Monitor application availability, performance, scheduled jobs, integrations, and system alerts.
• Coordinate regular maintenance windows and communicate planned outages to stakeholders.
• Maintain application support documentation, technical procedures, knowledge articles, and runbooks.
• Track product versions, vendors support timelines and upgrade requirements.
• Support backup, recovery, business continuity, and disaster recovery activities in coordination with infrastructure and cloud teams.

Business and Stakeholder Support

• Serve as the primary IT point of contact for business-managed applications.
• Work closely with business application owners and subject matter experts to understand requirements, priorities, and operational challenges.
• Translate business requests into technical requirements, configuration changes, or vendor support requests.
• Assess incoming requests for feasibility, technical impact, security considerations, dependencies, and level of effort.
• Provide guidance to business users on application capabilities, limitations, support processes, and technical best practices.
• Facilitate meetings with business teams, vendors, security teams, and technical stakeholders as required.

Release, Upgrade, and Change Management

• Plan and coordinate application releases, product upgrades, patches, and configuration deployments.
• Review release notes and assess the potential impact on existing configurations, integrations, customizations, and business processes.
• Develop upgrade plans, implementation procedures, rollback plans, testing strategies, and production validation checklists.
• Coordinate user acceptance testing with business stakeholders.
• Ensure changes follow established change-management and approval processes.
• Provide post-deployment support and monitor application stability after releases.

Integration and Technical Support

• Support integrations between business applications and enterprise systems using APIs, web services, middleware, file transfers, or scheduled interfaces.
• Troubleshoot data-flow issues, authentication failures, API errors, interface failures, and scheduled-job exceptions.
• Work with development, database, infrastructure, identity management, and network teams to resolve technical issues.
• Support authentication and access-management technologies such as SSO , SAML, OAuth, and Microsoft Entra ID, where applicable.
• Maintain technical documentation for integrations, dependencies, service accounts, certificates, endpoints, and data flows.

Security, Risk, and Compliance

• Ensure applications comply with organizational security, privacy, audit, and regulatory requirements.
• Coordinate security vulnerability remediation, patching, access reviews, and control-evidence collection.
• Work with cybersecurity teams to address application vulnerabilities and security findings.
• Support internal and external audits by providing application documentation, access records, change records, and control evidence.
• Ensure appropriate segregation of duties between business users, application administrators, developers, and approvers.
• Identify application risks and track mitigation actions through closure.

Vendor and License Management

• Coordinate with software vendors for product issues, patches, upgrades, roadmap discussions, and technical support.
• Raise and manage vendor support tickets, including timely follow-up and escalation.
• Track software licenses, subscriptions, renewals, support agreements, and application usage.
• Monitor vendor performance against support commitments and contractual SLAs.
• Participate in vendor technical reviews and application roadmap discussions.

Required Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent professional experience.
• Approximately 5 to 8 years of experience in application support, application administration, production support, or business systems management.
• Experience supporting business-managed, SaaS, commercial off-the-shelf, and web-based applications.
• Experience with application configuration, maintenance, patching, upgrades, access management, and production support.
• Experience coordinating with business users, application vendors, infrastructure teams, security teams, and development teams.
• Ability to troubleshoot application, integration, authentication, configuration, and performance issues.
• Strong documentation skills, including the ability to prepare support procedures, technical runbooks, implementation plans, and knowledge articles.
• Strong communication and stakeholder-management skills.

Preferred Technical Skills

• Experience administering or supporting platforms such as OneTrust, Optimizely/Episerver, CRAFT AMS, or similar enterprise applications.
• Knowledge of Jetty-based Java web applications and application server concepts.
• Understanding of web technologies, including REST APIs, JSON, XML, SSL/TLS certificates, and web services.
• Basic knowledge of Java-based application environments.
• Exposure to cloud platforms such as Microsoft Azure or AWS.
• Understanding of CI/CD pipelines and deployment automation is beneficial.

Key Competencies

• Strong analytical and troubleshooting capabilities
• Customer-focused and service-oriented approach
• Ability to translate business requirements into technical actions
• Effective coordination across business, IT, and vendor teams
• Strong ownership and accountability
• Ability to manage multiple applications and priorities
• Risk awareness and attention to security and compliance
• Clear written and verbal communication
• Proactive problem-solving and continuous improvement mindset

Role Expectations

The successful candidate should be comfortable working in a hybrid application-ownership model where:

• Business teams manage daily functional activities and application content.
• IT owns technical administration, security, integrations, maintenance, upgrades, and operational stability.
• Some business requests require IT assessment, configuration, testing, and controlled deployment.