Application Support Lead
Req number:
R8507
Employment type:
Full time
Worksite flexibility:
Remote
Who we are
CAI is a global services firm with over 9,000 associates worldwide and a yearly revenue of $1.3 billion+. We have over 40 years of excellence in uniting talent and technology to power the possible for our clients, colleagues, and communities. As a privately held company, we have the freedom and focus to do what is right—whatever it takes. Our tailor-made solutions create lasting results across the public and commercial sectors, and we are trailblazers in bringing neurodiversity to the enterprise.
Job Summary
As a Application Support Lead, you will report to the Sr. Manager of Software Engineering and is responsible for ensuring the stability, reliability, performance, and operational excellence of critical business applications and services. This role provides technical leadership for production support activities, major incident management, problem resolution, root cause analysis, service reliability improvements, and operational readiness across the product portfolio.
Job Description
We are looking for a Application Support Lead serves as the primary technical escalation point for complex production issues and works closely with Engineering, Product Management, Infrastructure, Security, QA, and Business stakeholders to ensure high system availability and customer satisfaction. This role requires strong expertise in application support, troubleshooting, software engineering, DevOps practices, observability tools, incident response, and continuous improvement methodologies. This position will be full-time and remote.
What You'll Do
- Lead production support activities for business-critical applications and services
- Ensure high availability, performance, reliability, and operational stability of supported systems
- Act as the technical escalation point for critical incidents and complex production issues
- Coordinate cross-functional teams during incident response and service restoration efforts
- Drive effective communication during incidents, outages, and service disruptions
- Lead Major Incident Management (MIM) activities and support timely issue resolution
- Conduct root cause analysis (RCA) and post-incident reviews to identify corrective and preventative actions
- Develop and maintain incident management processes, support runbooks, and operational procedures
- Track recurring issues and implement permanent fixes to reduce incident volume
- Monitor support metrics and service trends to proactively identify risks and improvement opportunities
- Establish and enforce production support standards, operational procedures, and service-level objectives
- Drive application resiliency, scalability, performance, and reliability improvements
- Implement monitoring, alerting, observability, and automated recovery capabilities
- Lead initiatives focused on reducing technical debt and increasing platform stability
- Ensure systems meet security, compliance, audit, and governance requirements
- Provide technical leadership and guidance to production support engineers
- Mentor team members and promote knowledge sharing across the organization
- Collaborate with development teams to improve application supportability and operational readiness
- Participate in architecture reviews to ensure operational requirements are considered throughout the software lifecycle
- Define best practices for support transition, deployment readiness, and production acceptance
- Drive automation initiatives to improve efficiency and reduce manual operational tasks
- Improve incident detection, diagnosis, remediation, and reporting processes
- Partner with engineering teams to implement self-healing and proactive support capabilities
- Promote continuous improvement through metrics, analysis, and operational reviews
- Partner with Product Owners, Engineering teams, Infrastructure teams, Vendors, and Business stakeholders
- Provide operational status reporting and executive-level communication on system health and service performance
- Participate in change management processes to assess operational risk and production readiness
- Ensure support priorities align with business and operational objectives
- Participate in production support on-call and escalation processes as required
- Perform other job-related duties as assigned by management
- Budget and Resource Planning
- Understand accounting rules related to expense and capital activities
- Identify opportunities for operational cost optimization
- Monitor production support efforts and resource utilization
- Support planning and prioritization of maintenance, reliability, and technical debt initiatives
What You'll Need
Required:
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or a related discipline
- 8+ years of experience in Software Engineering, Application Support, Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), or Production Operations
- 3+ years of experience leading technical teams or production support organizations
- Experience supporting mission-critical enterprise applications in a 24x7 environment
- Demonstrated success leading major incident management and service restoration efforts
- Experience working within globally distributed teams and complex enterprise environments
- Deep understanding of Incident, Problem, Change, and Release Management processes
- Experience leading critical incident response and coordinating cross-functional resolution teams
- Strong analytical and troubleshooting capabilities for complex application and infrastructure issues
- Proven ability to perform detailed root cause investigations for system failures and performance degradation
- Establish corrective and preventative actions to improve overall service reliability
- Experience implementing and supporting monitoring, alerting, logging, and observability platforms
- Ability to define service health indicators, operational dashboards, and support metrics
- Strong understanding of modern application architectures, APIs, microservices, databases, and cloud technologies
- Working knowledge of Java, React, NextJS, SQL, and related enterprise application technologies
- Ability to review code, identify supportability improvements, and collaborate effectively with development teams
- Experience with CI/CD pipelines, deployment automation, and operational tooling
- Ability to automate repetitive support tasks and operational processes
- Familiarity with Infrastructure as Code (IaC), scripting, and cloud-native operational practices
- Strong understanding of system performance, scalability, resiliency, and disaster recovery principles
- Experience improving application uptime and reducing service disruptions
- Ensure compliance with enterprise standards, security requirements, and operational controls
- Participate in audits, operational reviews, and risk management activities
- Lead, mentor, and develop production support engineers
- Foster a culture of accountability, ownership, innovation, and continuous improvement
- Promote knowledge sharing and operational best practices across teams
- Ability to communicate technical issues and operational risks to both technical and executive audiences
- Strong collaboration skills with Product, Engineering, Infrastructure, QA, Security, and Business teams
Preferred:
- Experience supporting enterprise applications in cloud environments such as Azure or AWS
- Experience with ServiceNow, Jira, Dynatrace, Splunk, AppDynamics, Datadog, Grafana, or similar observability platforms
- Experience managing on-call support rotations and operational support models
- Understanding of ITIL processes and Service Management best practices
- Experience implementing SRE practices, service-level indicators (SLIs), service-level objectives (SLOs), and operational maturity frameworks
Physical Demands
- Ability to safely and successfully perform the essential job functions
- Sedentary work that involves sitting or remaining stationary most of the time with occasional need to move around the office to attend meetings, etc.
- Ability to conduct repetitive tasks on a computer, utilizing a mouse, keyboard, and monitor
Reasonable accommodation statement
If you require a reasonable accommodation in completing this application, interviewing, completing any pre-employment testing, or otherwise participating in the employment selection process, please direct your inquiries to application.accommodations@cai.io or (888) 824 – 8111.
