Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Application Operations Engineer

🎯 Role Definition

We are seeking an Application Operations Engineer to ensure the availability, performance, and secure operation of business-critical applications across cloud and hybrid environments. The ideal candidate blends hands-on operational skills with automation-first thinking, proactive monitoring, and strong incident management capabilities. This role works closely with Development, Platform, Security, and Product teams to operationalize new releases, automate runbooks, and continuously improve reliability and deployment velocity.

Core focus areas:

Incident response, root cause analysis, and post-incident remediation
Platform and application monitoring, alerting, and observability
CI/CD pipeline ownership and release coordination
Automation of operational tasks using scripting and IaC
Capacity planning, performance tuning, and cost optimization

Keywords: Application Operations Engineer, Application Support, SRE, DevOps, Incident Management, CI/CD, Kubernetes, AWS, Azure, Terraform, Prometheus, Grafana, observability, automation, SLAs, runbooks.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

DevOps Engineer
Systems Administrator / Linux Engineer
Application Support Engineer

Advancement To:

Senior Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)
Platform Engineering Lead
Manager, Production Engineering

Lateral Moves:

Cloud Operations Engineer
Release Manager
Security Operations Engineer

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

Own end-to-end incident management for assigned applications, including triage, mitigation, escalation, on-call rotation participation, and communicating status to stakeholders until service restoration.
Lead root cause analysis (RCA) and post-incident reviews, produce actionable remediation plans, and drive cross-team follow-through to eliminate repeat incidents and improve service-level objectives (SLOs).
Design, implement, and maintain robust monitoring and observability for applications using tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, New Relic, or ELK; define meaningful alerts, dashboards, and health checks aligned to SLAs.
Manage CI/CD pipelines and release workflows (Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps) to ensure safe, repeatable, and automated deployments across environments while maintaining rollback strategies and deployment gating.
Automate repetitive operational tasks, runbook procedures, and remediation steps using scripting (Python, Bash, PowerShell) and configuration management tools (Ansible, Chef, Puppet).
Maintain and operate containerized applications on platforms like Kubernetes/OpenShift, including deployment manifests, Helm charts, autoscaling, and troubleshooting pod/network/storage issues.
Implement infrastructure-as-code (IaC) using Terraform, CloudFormation, or Pulumi to provision and version cloud resources and enforce environment consistency.
Drive performance tuning and capacity planning for application stacks (compute, memory, storage, database), proactively forecasting growth and recommending scaling strategies to meet demand.
Collaborate with development teams to instrument applications for observability (tracing, metrics, structured logs), promote library-level monitoring, and enable actionable telemetry.
Enforce and operationalize security best practices for applications and platform components, including secrets management, network policies, vulnerability scanning, and collaborating with security teams on remediation.
Own change and release management processes for production-impacting changes, evaluate risk, coordinate windows, and document change approvals in accordance with ITIL or internal governance.
Build and maintain runbooks and standardized operational documentation for common incidents, recovery procedures, escalation paths, and onboarding of engineers into production support.
Manage day-to-day platform health tasks such as log management, retention policies, backup validation, disaster recovery exercises, and failover testing for critical services.
Integrate and maintain alert routing and escalation with on-call tooling (PagerDuty, Opsgenie), tuning noise reduction, and ensuring clear ownership and response SLAs.
Troubleshoot application and middleware issues spanning web servers, application servers, caching layers, message queues, and databases; apply strong debugging and diagnostic skills to identify root causes.
Implement blue/green, canary, and feature-flag deployment strategies to minimize production risk and support incremental delivery practices.
Partner with site reliability, platform, and engineering teams to identify technical debt, lifecycle upgrades, and deprecation plans for application dependencies and third-party services.
Monitor cloud spend and optimize costs through right-sizing, reserved instances/savings plans, garbage collection of unused resources, and efficient architectural patterns.
Define and measure key operational metrics and KPIs (MTTR, MTTD, MTBF, change failure rate) and present regular reports to engineering leadership to drive continuous improvement.
Participate in capacity planning, disaster recovery planning, and business continuity activities; maintain runbooks and perform tabletop exercises to validate operational readiness.
Drive onboarding and knowledge transfer sessions for application teams on operational requirements, SLO/SLA responsibilities, deployment processes, and tooling.
Evaluate, select, and help adopt new operational tooling and observability solutions, performing proof-of-concepts and facilitating organizational rollout.

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.
Assist with dev/test environment provisioning, sandbox cleanup, and environment cloning to support developer productivity.
Coach development teams on production readiness, operational best practices, and deployment hygiene.
Participate in cross-functional architecture reviews and offer operational perspectives to design decisions.
Support compliance, audit, and regulatory requirements by providing evidence, logs, and change history as required.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

Strong experience with incident management and on-call rotations, including using PagerDuty, Opsgenie, or equivalent.
Proficiency with Linux systems administration and troubleshooting (systemd, networking, logs, kernel-level diagnostics).
Expertise in container orchestration (Kubernetes), including deployments, networking, storage, pod troubleshooting, and Helm.
Hands-on with cloud platforms: AWS, Azure, and/or Google Cloud Platform (compute, networking, IAM, managed services).
Experience building and managing CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions, Azure DevOps) and automating deployments.
Infrastructure-as-Code proficiency: Terraform, CloudFormation, or Pulumi to manage cloud resources reliably.
Scripting and automation skills in Python, Bash, or PowerShell for tool integration and operational automation.
Observability tooling experience: Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/EFK, Datadog, New Relic, or Splunk for logs, metrics, and tracing.
Database and middleware operational knowledge: MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka, RabbitMQ, or equivalent systems.
Configuration management and automation experience: Ansible, Chef, Puppet, or similar.
Familiarity with networking concepts, load balancers, DNS, TLS, firewalls, and performance tuning.
Security operations basics: secrets management (Vault/KMS), vulnerability scanning, patching, and least-privilege access controls.
Knowledge of release orchestration, change management, and ITIL practices for production operations.
Experience with monitoring SLO/SLA definitions, service-level indicators (SLIs), and operational metrics collection.

Soft Skills

Strong communication skills for clear incident updates, stakeholder coordination, and cross-functional collaboration.
Proven problem-solving and analytical thinking to diagnose complex production issues under pressure.
Customer-focused mindset, prioritizing user impact and driving timely resolution while balancing technical debt.
Ability to document clearly — runbooks, postmortems, runbook automation, and knowledge base articles.
Collaborative team player who can work effectively with development, QA, security, and product teams.
Time management and prioritization skills to balance operational tasks, project work, and on-call responsibilities.
Proactive ownership mentality and drive to automate manual work and reduce toil.
Adaptability in a fast-paced environment and willingness to learn new tools and cloud services.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience. Equivalent relevant experience is acceptable in lieu of a degree.

Preferred Education:

Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Systems Engineering, or related technical field.
Certifications such as AWS Certified SysOps/Admin, AWS Certified DevOps Engineer, Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA), or relevant cloud/IaC certifications are a plus.

Relevant Fields of Study:

Computer Science
Software Engineering
Information Systems
Network Engineering
Systems Engineering

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

3–7 years of hands-on experience in application operations, site reliability, DevOps, or production engineering roles.

Preferred:

5+ years operating production applications at scale, with demonstrable experience in cloud platforms, container orchestration (Kubernetes), CI/CD pipelines, and observability.
Prior experience managing on-call rotations and incident response in a 24x7 production environment.