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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Enterprise Web Application Support Engineer

💰 $ - $

ITSupportWeb ApplicationsEngineeringDevOps

🎯 Role Definition

The Enterprise Web Application Support Engineer is a specialist responsible for ensuring the availability, stability, and performance of mission-critical web applications used across the organization. This role combines deep technical troubleshooting, application lifecycle support, incident and problem management, and cross-functional collaboration with development, infrastructure, security, and business teams. The ideal candidate excels at root-cause analysis, user-impact reduction, and continuous improvement of application support processes in both on-premises and cloud environments.

Key SEO / LLM keywords: enterprise web application support, application performance monitoring, incident response, production troubleshooting, SQL tuning, IIS/Apache/Nginx, Java/.NET runtime support, cloud-native applications, ServiceNow, DevOps collaboration.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Help Desk Technician with escalation experience to application teams
  • Application Support Analyst or Junior Web Support Engineer
  • System Administrator or Infrastructure Support Engineer with web stack exposure

Advancement To:

  • Senior Enterprise Web Application Support Engineer
  • Technical Lead — Application Operations
  • Application Support Manager / Head of Production Support
  • Site Reliability Engineer (SRE) / DevOps Engineer
  • Solutions Architect focused on application platforms

Lateral Moves:

  • DevOps Engineer / CI-CD Engineer
  • Application Performance Engineer / APM Specialist
  • Quality Assurance Engineer specializing in production testing

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Provide 24x7x365 production support and first/second/third-line troubleshooting for enterprise web applications, ensuring minimal downtime and SLA adherence by quickly diagnosing and resolving incidents across the full web stack.
  • Act as a primary incident responder during production outages, lead triage calls, coordinate cross-functional teams (development, infrastructure, database, security), and drive incident lifecycle to timely resolution with clear communication to stakeholders.
  • Perform in-depth root cause analysis (RCA) for recurring incidents and outages, produce detailed RCA reports with corrective actions, and track remediation to closure to prevent recurrence and reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR).
  • Monitor application health and performance using APM tools (e.g., New Relic, Dynatrace, AppDynamics), log analytics (ELK/Elastic Stack), and infrastructure monitoring (Prometheus, Grafana), and proactively resolve issues before they impact users.
  • Troubleshoot web server and application server issues across IIS, Apache, Nginx, Tomcat, JBoss, WebLogic, WebSphere, and/or .NET and JVM runtimes, including configuration, patching, and tuning for performance and stability.
  • Analyze application and system logs, gather diagnostic artifacts (thread dumps, heap dumps, SQL traces, request traces), and collaborate with developers to identify and remediate code-level root causes impacting production.
  • Manage and optimize database interactions for enterprise applications by diagnosing slow queries, analyzing execution plans, applying indexing or query tuning, and coordinating schema changes with DBAs for SQL Server, Oracle, PostgreSQL, or MySQL.
  • Support application deployments and releases in coordination with DevOps and release management, validating deployment success, performing post-deploy verification, and executing rollback plans when needed.
  • Build, maintain, and automate runbooks, operational runbooks, knowledge base articles, and runbook playbooks to ensure standardized incident response and onboarding of new team members.
  • Maintain and operate CI/CD pipelines for application delivery, provide feedback on deployment automation, and work with development teams to improve deployment reliability and rollback mechanisms.
  • Implement and enforce monitoring and alerting thresholds, refine alerts to reduce noise, and ensure alerts are actionable and linked to runbooks and escalation paths.
  • Troubleshoot authentication, authorization, and SSO issues involving LDAP, Active Directory, OAuth, SAML, and federated identity providers to ensure secure and reliable user access.
  • Perform routine capacity planning and performance tuning for web and application servers, including memory and thread pool adjustments, JVM tuning, and scaling recommendations to support business growth and peak traffic.
  • Manage SSL/TLS lifecycle for enterprise web applications, including certificate renewal, chain validation, and troubleshooting encrypted traffic issues impacting application connectivity.
  • Configure and troubleshoot load balancers, reverse proxies, CDN integrations, and caching layers (Redis, Memcached) to optimize performance and high availability for web applications.
  • Execute and validate disaster recovery and high-availability failover procedures for application environments, including scripted failovers, database replicas, and multi-region recovery tests.
  • Handle complex production support tickets through ITSM platforms (ServiceNow, BMC Remedy, Jira Service Management), maintain SLAs, update stakeholders, and ensure proper ticket closure with post-mortem notes.
  • Collaborate closely with security teams to remediate vulnerabilities affecting web applications, implement secure coding and deployment practices, and participate in security incident response related to application layer threats.
  • Lead continuous improvement initiatives to automate manual support tasks (scripting with PowerShell, Bash, Python), reduce toil, improve MTTR, and increase overall operational efficiency.
  • Conduct proactive health checks, perform scheduled maintenance windows, and coordinate with business owners to schedule non-disruptive upgrades and patches.
  • Provide on-call mentoring and knowledge transfer to junior engineers, helping develop troubleshooting skills, runbook familiarity, and incident handling best practices.
  • Participate in performance testing and load-testing exercises with QA and development teams, analyze results, and recommend architectural or configuration changes to meet performance goals.
  • Maintain version control and configuration management for support scripts, operational automation, and environment documentation to ensure reproducible results and auditability.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc reporting requests related to application health, incident trends, and service metrics to help product owners plan improvements.
  • Contribute to the organization's operational standards, playbook library, and a culture of blameless post-mortems and continual learning.
  • Assist with onboarding and handover of new applications to the support organization, ensuring runbooks, monitoring, and alerting are in place before go-live.
  • Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies when supporting platform or infrastructure engineering teams to align operational priorities with development work.
  • Identify and propose improvements for application observability, instrumentation, and telemetry to enable faster diagnostics and better customer experience monitoring.
  • Collaborate with vendor support teams for commercial web application products or middleware to expedite resolution of third-party issues.
  • Help define and refine SLAs, SLOs, and error budgets in partnership with product and business stakeholders.
  • Mentor and cross-train team members to improve resilience, knowledge coverage, and support readiness.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Production incident management and troubleshooting for enterprise web applications (24x7 support, major incident coordination, RCA).
  • Strong knowledge of web servers and application servers: IIS, Apache, Nginx, Tomcat, JBoss, WebLogic, WebSphere.
  • Hands-on experience with application runtimes: Java (JVM), .NET (CLR), including garbage collection, thread analysis, and runtime tuning.
  • Proficiency with SQL and relational databases (MS SQL Server, Oracle, PostgreSQL, MySQL) — query optimization, execution plans, and indexing strategies.
  • Familiarity with application performance monitoring (APM) tools: New Relic, Dynatrace, AppDynamics, Datadog, or similar.
  • Log aggregation and analysis skills using ELK/Elastic Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, Kibana), Splunk, or similar platforms.
  • Scripting and automation experience (PowerShell, Bash, Python) to automate diagnostics, remediation, and deployment tasks.
  • Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) and cloud-native services supporting web apps (EC2, ECS/EKS, Azure App Services, Load Balancers).
  • Knowledge of CI/CD and deployment pipelines (Jenkins, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps, CircleCI) and blue/green or canary deployment strategies.
  • Networking and protocols knowledge: HTTP/HTTPS, TCP/IP, DNS, CDN integrations, load balancing, SSL/TLS lifecycle management.
  • Familiarity with authentication and identity systems (LDAP/AD, OAuth, SAML, Single Sign-On).
  • Experience with containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes) and troubleshooting containerized web applications in production.
  • ITSM and ticketing tools proficiency (ServiceNow, Jira Service Management, BMC Remedy) and awareness of ITIL best practices.
  • Monitoring, alerting and metrics tooling experience (Prometheus, Grafana, CloudWatch) and designing actionable alerts.
  • Configuration management and infrastructure-as-code basics (Terraform, Ansible, Chef, Puppet) for reproducible platform changes.
  • Security basics for web apps: OWASP top 10 awareness, vulnerability remediation processes, secure deployment practices.
  • Familiarity with caching and in-memory stores (Redis, Memcached) and their impact on throughput and latency.
  • Performance testing and load testing familiarity (JMeter, Gatling) to support scaling and capacity exercises.
  • Experience with vendor-managed support and third-party application troubleshooting.

Soft Skills

  • Excellent verbal and written communication, able to translate technical issues into business-impact statements for non-technical stakeholders.
  • Customer-centric mindset with strong service orientation and the ability to manage escalations calmly under pressure.
  • Strong analytical and critical thinking skills with demonstrated ability to perform root cause analysis and long-term remediation planning.
  • Collaboration and teamwork: works effectively across development, infrastructure, security, and product teams.
  • Time management and prioritization skills to handle multiple incidents, changes, and projects concurrently.
  • Attention to detail and documentation focus: produces comprehensive runbooks, post-incident reports, and knowledge base articles.
  • Problem ownership and accountability: follows through on issues to resolution and drives closure of action items.
  • Adaptability and continuous learning orientation to keep pace with evolving web stacks, cloud services, and monitoring tools.
  • Mentoring and coaching skills to help junior engineers grow and to elevate team capability.
  • Stakeholder management and escalation skills: sets clear expectations and communicates status proactively during incidents.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Software Engineering, or a related technical field — or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Education:

  • Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science or related field.
  • Professional certifications such as AWS/Azure Certified, ITIL Foundation, CompTIA Security+, or relevant vendor certifications.

Relevant Fields of Study:

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

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 3 to 7 years of hands-on experience supporting enterprise web applications, production incident response, and application stack troubleshooting.

Preferred:

  • 5+ years supporting large-scale web applications in enterprise environments, experience with cloud-native deployments (AWS/Azure), demonstrable experience with APM, database tuning, monitoring and automation, and a track record of leading major incident responses or continuous improvement initiatives.
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