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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Application Administrator

💰 $65,000 - $110,000

ITSystems AdministrationApplication SupportDevOps

🎯 Role Definition

The Application Administrator is responsible for the stable operation, configuration, maintenance, and optimization of enterprise applications and middleware. This role combines technical administration, system integration, incident and change management, security and compliance, automation, and cross-functional collaboration to ensure applications meet service-level agreements (SLAs) and business requirements. Ideal candidates bring hands-on experience with application stacks (web servers, application servers, databases), cloud and on-premise deployments, monitoring and logging, and strong stakeholder communication.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Help Desk Technician or IT Support Analyst transitioning into second-level application support.
  • Systems Administrator or Server Administrator who has managed middleware, databases or production services.
  • Application Support Engineer or Developer Operations (DevOps) Engineer with application deployment experience.

Advancement To:

  • Senior Application Administrator / Lead Application Engineer
  • Application Operations Manager or IT Operations Manager
  • Solutions Architect, Platform Engineer, or Cloud Operations Lead

Lateral Moves:

  • Release Manager / Build and Release Engineer
  • DevOps Engineer / Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)
  • Business Systems Analyst or Functional Application Consultant

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Manage installation, configuration, patching, and lifecycle maintenance of enterprise applications, middleware (e.g., WebLogic, JBoss, Tomcat), and associated web servers (IIS, Apache) to ensure secure, compliant, and up-to-date production environments.
  • Own day-to-day production support for assigned applications including queue and ticket management, Tier 2/Tier 3 troubleshooting, root cause analysis, and timely resolution of incidents to meet SLA and SLA breach prevention targets.
  • Administer and optimize databases (SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL/Postgres) supporting applications: monitor performance, tune queries, manage indexing strategies, coordinate DB backups and restores, and engage DBAs for complex issues.
  • Implement and manage identity and access control for applications using Active Directory, Azure AD, LDAP, SAML, OAuth, and role-based access control (RBAC), including provisioning, de-provisioning, and access reviews to meet security policies and audits.
  • Create, maintain, and execute deployment pipelines and release processes (CI/CD) for application updates, hotfixes, and configuration changes in collaboration with development, QA, and release teams to ensure reliable, repeatable deployments.
  • Design and maintain comprehensive monitoring, logging, and alerting for application health using tools such as Splunk, ELK/Elastic Stack, Prometheus, Grafana, New Relic, AppDynamics, or Datadog to proactively detect and remediate performance and availability issues.
  • Lead or participate in outage response, incident command, and post-incident reviews; document incident timelines, corrective actions, and preventative measures to improve platform resilience and reduce recurrence.
  • Perform routine capacity planning and performance testing for application stacks to forecast resource needs, plan hardware/cloud scaling, and optimize cost and performance for on-premises or cloud-native deployments.
  • Manage certificate lifecycle (SSL/TLS), token management, and secure communications for applications, including certificate renewals, trust store management, and remediation of expired or misconfigured certificates.
  • Execute data migration, environment cloning, and data refresh processes across development, test, staging, and production environments while ensuring data masking and compliance with privacy requirements.
  • Maintain and document runbooks, operational procedures, and playbooks for common tasks (start/stop services, failover, backup/recovery) to enable consistent on-call and escalation handling.
  • Lead or support scheduled patching and maintenance windows for application OS, middleware, and dependent services; coordinate stakeholder communications and rollback plans to minimize business disruption.
  • Implement configuration management and infrastructure-as-code (IaC) practices with tools such as Ansible, Terraform, Puppet, or Chef to standardize environments, reduce drift, and increase deployment reliability.
  • Support integration points, APIs, and middleware connectivity with other enterprise systems (ERP, CRM, messaging queues) and troubleshoot integration issues including timeouts, schema mismatches, and message failures.
  • Enforce and monitor application security controls and compliance requirements (PCI, HIPAA, SOC2) by collaborating with information security teams on vulnerability scans, penetration testing remediation, and secure configuration baselines.
  • Perform regular backup and disaster recovery exercises including validating backups, recovering test environments, and updating DR runbooks to meet recovery time objectives (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO).
  • Develop automation scripts (PowerShell, Bash, Python) to accelerate repetitive operational tasks, improve reproducibility, and reduce human error across administration activities.
  • Coordinate with vendors and third-party support for application-specific issues, license management, patch advisories, and escalations requiring vendor intervention.
  • Establish and measure operational KPIs (MTTR, MTBF, uptime, incident counts) and produce regular health and performance reports for stakeholders and governance forums.
  • Provide on-call rotation support, weekend and after-hours incident response, and coordinated communications during outages, ensuring clear status updates to leadership and impacted business units.
  • Drive continuous improvement initiatives for application operations including cost optimization, automation, runbook improvements, and cross-training to raise team capability and efficiency.
  • Facilitate environment hygiene and lifecycle management including decommissioning unused resources, tagging and inventory of application components, and enforcing change control processes.
  • Collaborate with development teams on application design decisions that impact operability, observability, security, and scalability to enable a DevSecOps culture.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
  • Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
  • Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
  • Provide mentoring and training for junior administrators and cross-functional teams on application operations best practices.
  • Assist in vendor evaluations, proof-of-concepts, and pilot deployments for new application tooling or platform services.
  • Participate in architecture and change advisory board (CAB) meetings to vet changes for risk, impact, and rollback strategy.
  • Assist in license tracking, renewal coordination, and budget forecasting for application platforms and associated tooling.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Application Administration: Production support, installation, configuration, patching, and lifecycle management for enterprise applications and middleware (WebLogic, Tomcat, JBoss, IIS).
  • Operating Systems: Strong Linux (RHEL, Ubuntu, CentOS) and Windows Server experience for application hosting, troubleshooting, and scripting.
  • Databases: Hands-on SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL or PostgreSQL administration basics—query tuning, backups, restores, and connection/config troubleshooting.
  • Cloud Platforms: Experience with AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform for provisioning, autoscaling, networking, and managing cloud-native application services.
  • Identity & Access Management: Active Directory, Azure AD, SAML, OAuth, LDAP integration, and RBAC implementation for secure application authentication/authorization.
  • Scripting & Automation: PowerShell, Bash, Python or similar for automation, maintenance scripts, and CI/CD integration.
  • CI/CD & Build Tools: Familiarity with Jenkins, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps, or similar tools to deploy and maintain automated release pipelines.
  • Monitoring & Observability: Use of Splunk, ELK, Prometheus, Grafana, AppDynamics, New Relic, or Datadog for logging, metrics, traces and alerting.
  • Configuration Management / IaC: Experience with Ansible, Terraform, Puppet, or Chef for environment consistency and reproducible deployments.
  • Networking & Security: Knowledge of TCP/IP, load balancers, firewalls, SSL/TLS, VPNs, and secure application connectivity patterns.
  • Incident/Change Management & ITSM: Practical experience with ITIL best practices and ITSM tools like ServiceNow, JIRA Service Desk, or BMC Remedy for ticketing and change control.
  • Backup & DR: Design and validation of backup strategies, disaster recovery planning, and recovery testing for application and database layers.
  • Performance Tuning & Capacity Planning: Profiling application performance, load testing, and forecasting resources under growth scenarios.
  • Middleware & Integration: Experience with message brokers, API gateways, web services (REST/SOAP) and troubleshooting integration flows.
  • Certificate Management: Managing SSL/TLS certificate lifecycle, keystores, and secure TLS configurations.

Soft Skills

  • Strong analytical and problem-solving skills with an ability to perform root cause analysis and produce actionable remediation plans.
  • Excellent verbal and written communication capable of translating technical issues to business stakeholders and producing clear runbooks and postmortems.
  • Customer-focused mindset with commitment to high-quality service delivery and stakeholder satisfaction.
  • Time management and prioritization skills to balance competing production, project, and maintenance work.
  • Collaboration and teamwork across development, QA, security, networking, and vendor partners in matrixed environments.
  • Adaptability and continuous learning mindset to adopt new technologies and best practices in application operations.
  • Attention to detail and process orientation to follow and improve change management and compliance processes.
  • Leadership and mentorship for coaching junior staff and driving operational improvements.
  • Resilience under pressure and calm incident management demeanor during on-call rotations and outages.
  • Critical thinking and decision-making skills for risk assessment, rollback planning, and emergency fixes.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Computer Engineering, or equivalent technical experience.

Preferred Education:

  • Bachelor's degree plus relevant certifications (e.g., Microsoft Certified: Azure Administrator, AWS Certified SysOps Administrator, RHCE, ITIL Foundation, Certified Application Administrator where applicable).

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Information Technology / Systems
  • Software Engineering
  • Network / Systems Administration

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 3 to 7 years of professional experience in application administration, systems administration, or application support in enterprise IT environments.

Preferred:

  • 5+ years administering enterprise applications in production environments, experience with cloud migrations, CI/CD pipelines, and demonstrable incident and change management experience. Experience supporting business-critical applications and working with cross-functional technical and business teams is highly desirable.
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