L2 Application Support Engineer
The L2 Application Support Engineer is a critical role within the Production Support and Operations team. This individual is responsible for providing high-quality technical support, troubleshooting, and incident resolution for complex enterprise applications and platforms. Acting as the bridge between L1 Helpdesk/Monitoring teams and L3 Development/Engineering groups, the L2 Engineer ensures system availability, stability, and adherence to strict Service Level Agreements (SLAs) in a fast-paced, enterprise technology environment.
Key Responsibilities
1. Incident & Problem Management
- Escalation Handling: Acknowledge and own incidents escalated by the L1 support team or monitoring alerts.
- Troubleshooting & Diagnosis: Perform in-depth technical analysis and root cause investigation of application, database, middleware, and infrastructure failures.
- Workaround Implementation: Apply approved temporary workarounds or permanent hotfixes to restore services quickly and minimize business impact.
- Collaboration: Partner with L3 developers, database administrators (DBAs), network engineers, and system administrators to resolve complex, multi-tiered issues.
- Incident Lifecycle Management: Track and document all incident progression within the ITSM platform (e.g., ServiceNow) from creation through to resolution.
2. Monitoring, Observability & Preventive Maintenance
- System Monitoring: Actively monitor application health, batch jobs, integration feeds, and system performance using enterprise observability suites.
- Proactive Interventions: Identify recurring patterns, error trends, or capacity bottlenecks and initiate preventative actions.
- Health Checks: Perform daily health checks, start-of-day (SOD) and end-of-day (EOD) verifications, and batch processing runs.
3. Release, Deployment & Configuration Management
- Deployment Validation: Support the verification of application deployments, system patches, and infrastructure upgrades during maintenance windows.
- Configuration Controls: Maintain and update application configuration files, environment variables, and parameter settings under strict change management processes.
- Environment Management: Assist in maintaining non-production (UAT/Staging) and production environments to ensure consistency.
4. Communication & Stakeholder Management
- Status Updates: Provide clear, timely, and precise communications to business stakeholders, product owners, and technology leadership during critical (Sev-1/Sev-2) incidents.
- Bridges & War Rooms: Participate in or lead technical incident bridges to coordinate restoration efforts.
- Post-Incident Reviews: Contribute technical inputs to Post-Incident Reviews (PIRs) and Root Cause Analysis (RCA) documentation.
5. Documentation & Knowledge Management
- Runbooks & SOPs: Document and update Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), application architecture maps, and troubleshooting runbooks.
- Knowledge Sharing: Train L1 teams on common issue resolution paths to shift-left workloads and improve first-contact resolution rates.
Required Technical Skills
- Scripting & Automation - Proficiency in writing and debugging Shell scripting (Bash), PowerShell, or Python to automate daily tasks and analyze log files.
- Databases & Querying - Strong SQL skills (Oracle, MS SQL, Sybase, or PostgreSQL). Ability to write complex select queries, joins, analyze execution plans, and run database scripts.
- Middleware & Web Servers - Working knowledge of Apache, Tomcat, Nginx, WebSphere, and messaging queues like IBM MQ, RabbitMQ, or Apache Kafka.
- Cloud & Containerization - Familiarity with Docker, Kubernetes, OpenShift, or cloud infrastructure (AWS/Azure) concepts and container deployments.
- Monitoring & Logging - Hands-on experience with tools such as Splunk, ELK Stack, AppDynamics, Dynatrace, Grafana, or ITRS Geneos.
- ITSM & Collaboration - Experience with ticketing tools like ServiceNow or Jira, and version control systems like Git or Bitbucket.
Required Professional & Soft Skills
- Analytical Mindset: Excellent logical reasoning and problem-solving skills; ability to systematically break down a complex issue.
- Communication: Exceptional verbal and written communication skills, with the ability to translate technical details into plain language for business teams.
- Pressure Tolerance: Calm demeanor under pressure, especially during high-severity system outages.
- Team Collaboration: Ability to work cohesively in a global, distributed cross-functional environment.
Qualifications & Experience
- Education: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related technical discipline.
- Experience: 5+ years of experience in an application support, technical support, or systems engineering role (preferably in an enterprise or financial services environment).
- Certifications (Desirable):
- ITIL v3 or v4 Foundation certification.
- Professional certifications in AWS/Azure, Kubernetes (CKAD), Linux Administration, or Oracle/SQL.
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Job Family Group:
Technology------------------------------------------------------
Job Family:
Applications Support------------------------------------------------------
Time Type:
Full time------------------------------------------------------
Most Relevant Skills
Please see the requirements listed above.------------------------------------------------------
Other Relevant Skills
For complementary skills, please see above and/or contact the recruiter.------------------------------------------------------
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