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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Technical Application Analyst

💰 $70,000 - $110,000

ITApplicationsSupportAnalysisDevOps

🎯 Role Definition

The Technical Application Analyst is a hands-on IT professional responsible for the ongoing support, optimization and lifecycle management of business-critical applications and integrations. This role combines application support, incident and problem management, technical troubleshooting, release coordination, and close collaboration with development, QA, infrastructure, and business stakeholders. The ideal candidate is fluent in application architecture, database troubleshooting, APIs/integration patterns, and ITIL-driven support processes, and can translate technical root causes into actionable fixes and clear stakeholder communication.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Junior Application Support Analyst or IT Support Specialist
  • System Administrator or Database Administrator
  • Business Systems Analyst or Technical Support Engineer

Advancement To:

  • Senior Technical Application Analyst / Lead Application Analyst
  • Application Support Manager or IT Operations Manager
  • Solutions Architect or Integration Architect

Lateral Moves:

  • DevOps Engineer
  • Release Manager
  • Business Analyst / Product Owner for applications

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Provide 24/7 application support and incident management for mission-critical enterprise applications, owning incidents from detection through resolution while minimizing business impact and meeting SLA targets.
  • Troubleshoot complex application issues across the stack (database, middleware, application code, integrations, and infrastructure) using logs, tracing, and monitoring tools to identify root cause and implement permanent fixes.
  • Perform thorough root cause analysis (RCA) following major incidents, documenting findings, corrective actions, and preventative measures, and driving cross-functional postmortems with development and operations teams.
  • Manage application deployments and release activities in coordination with Release Managers, ensuring deployment plans, rollback procedures, configuration changes, and post-deployment validation are executed and documented.
  • Maintain and administer production and non-production environments, including configuration management, application patching, service restarts, and scheduled maintenance tasks.
  • Develop and maintain operational runbooks, Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), runbook automation scripts, and knowledge base articles to ensure consistent and repeatable incident response.
  • Monitor application health using APM and monitoring platforms (Splunk, New Relic, Dynatrace, Nagios), create actionable alerts, and tune thresholding to reduce false positives while ensuring visibility into degradation and outages.
  • Manage application integrations and APIs (REST, SOAP), including onboarding new integrations, monitoring data flows, error reconciliation, and coordinating with third-party vendors for issue resolution.
  • Support database performance tuning and query optimization for SQL Server, Oracle, or other RDBMS instances to improve application performance and reduce latency.
  • Execute scheduled and ad-hoc ETL jobs, troubleshoot failed data loads, and collaborate with ETL developers to address data integrity issues in data pipelines and downstream systems.
  • Analyze and respond to production data anomalies, partner with business owners to validate transactions, and ensure reconciliation and audit trails are maintained for compliance.
  • Implement and maintain application security best practices, including patch management, encryption configuration, role-based access control, and coordination of vulnerability remediation with security teams.
  • Manage and fulfill change requests for application configurations, feature toggles, and environment-specific settings through formal change control processes and CAB approvals.
  • Act as the primary technical liaison between business stakeholders, product owners, developers, QA, and infrastructure teams to translate business requirements into technical tasks and prioritize fixes and enhancements.
  • Conduct performance, scalability, and capacity planning exercises to forecast resource needs and recommend infrastructure or application architecture changes to support growth.
  • Automate repetitive operational tasks using scripting (Python, PowerShell, Bash) and support continuous improvement initiatives to reduce mean-time-to-repair (MTTR) and manual effort.
  • Participate in agile ceremonies, sprint planning, and backlog grooming to ensure operational requirements and technical debt items are included in delivery plans.
  • Drive vendor management and escalation for third-party application providers, manage support contracts, and coordinate vendor-led fixes and upgrades.
  • Provide end-user support for application issues, produce timely status updates, and proactively communicate incident progress and resolution to impacted users and management.
  • Maintain data and transaction integrity across integrated systems by troubleshooting messaging queues, middleware (Kafka, RabbitMQ, MQSeries), and file transfer processes (SFTP).
  • Lead or contribute to application upgrades, platform migrations, and major release projects, including execution of migration plans, data migration validation, and cutover support.
  • Create and deliver technical training and handover sessions for junior analysts and business super-users to improve first-contact resolution and reduce escalations.
  • Ensure compliance with internal controls, audit requirements, and regulatory standards by maintaining documentation, access logs, and change histories for critical application components.

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 in cost optimization and license management activities for application portfolios.
  • Perform capacity and performance benchmarking for new features prior to production rollout.
  • Evaluate and recommend monitoring and observability tools to strengthen application resiliency.
  • Mentor junior team members on troubleshooting methodologies, support processes, and system architecture.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Application Support & Incident Management (ITIL foundations, SLA-driven support)
  • Strong SQL skills for diagnostics and optimization (SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL/Postgres)
  • Experience with application servers and middleware (WebLogic, Tomcat, IIS, .NET)
  • Familiarity with APIs and integrations (REST, SOAP, JSON, XML) and tools like Postman
  • Hands-on experience with monitoring and observability tools (Splunk, New Relic, Dynatrace, AppDynamics)
  • Scripting and automation (Python, PowerShell, Bash) for runbooks and operational automation
  • Knowledge of cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) and cloud-native services for application hosting
  • Experience with CI/CD pipelines and release tooling (Jenkins, GitLab CI, Azure DevOps)
  • Database administration basics — performance tuning, indexing, backup/recovery strategies
  • Experience with message queues and middleware (Kafka, RabbitMQ, IBM MQ)
  • Familiarity with configuration management tools and infrastructure-as-code (Ansible, Terraform)
  • Understanding of security practices (TLS, authentication mechanisms, RBAC) and vulnerability remediation
  • Experience with ETL tools and batch processing (SSIS, Informatica, Talend)
  • Proficiency in log analysis, tracing, and distributed transaction debugging
  • Experience with ticketing and ITSM platforms (ServiceNow, JIRA, Remedy)

Soft Skills

  • Clear, concise stakeholder communication and status reporting — both technical and non-technical audiences
  • Strong analytical thinking and methodical root-cause diagnosis
  • Customer-focused mindset with a commitment to meeting SLAs and user expectations
  • Excellent prioritization and time-management skills under pressure
  • Collaborative team player with experience working in cross-functional agile environments
  • Strong documentation and knowledge transfer capabilities
  • Adaptability to changing business priorities and hybrid on-call schedules
  • Problem ownership, resilience, and a proactive continuous-improvement attitude
  • Negotiation and vendor management skills for third-party issue escalation
  • Attention to detail, especially in change control and production deployments

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

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

Preferred Education:

  • Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in a technical discipline, or relevant professional certifications (ITIL Foundation, AWS/Azure certifications, Certified Application Support Analyst).

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Information Technology / Information Systems
  • Software Engineering
  • Data Engineering / Database Management

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range: 3 — 7 years of experience in application support, technical analysis, systems administration, or related roles.

Preferred: 5+ years supporting enterprise applications, proven experience with incident management, application integrations, and database performance troubleshooting. Prior experience in regulated industries (finance, healthcare) or with high-availability systems is a plus.

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