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Technical Application Support — Key Responsibilities and Required Skills

💰 $60,000 - $105,000

ITApplication SupportTechnical SupportDevOps

🎯 Role Definition

The Technical Application Support role is responsible for ensuring the availability, performance, and continuous improvement of critical business applications. This hands‑on position blends incident and problem management, application troubleshooting, configuration, deployment support, and customer‑facing communications. The ideal candidate acts as the technical escalation point for Tier 1 support teams, collaborates with development and operations to drive root cause resolution, and proactively implements fixes and automation to reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR) while meeting SLA targets.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Help Desk / Desktop Support Technician transitioning to application support.
  • Junior Application Support Analyst or Customer Support Engineer.
  • System Administrator with application exposure.

Advancement To:

  • Senior Technical Application Support Engineer / Lead.
  • Application Support Manager or Support Team Lead.
  • Solutions Architect, Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), or DevOps Engineer.

Lateral Moves:

  • Business Systems Analyst / Functional Analyst.
  • Release Manager or QA Automation Engineer.

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  1. Triage and resolve complex application incidents across web, desktop, and mobile clients, owning tickets from identification through root cause analysis and recovery while meeting SLA targets.
  2. Act as Tier 2/Tier 3 escalation contact for internal support teams and external customers, providing clear technical guidance, escalation prioritization, and timely status updates.
  3. Perform end‑to‑end troubleshooting of application stacks including front‑end, APIs (REST/SOAP), middleware, databases (SQL Server, Oracle), and underlying OS (Windows, Linux).
  4. Execute incident management and problem management processes aligned with ITIL best practices, documenting RCA (root cause analysis) and permanent corrective actions.
  5. Monitor application health using APM and logging tools (Datadog, New Relic, AppDynamics, Splunk), investigate alerts, and tune thresholds to improve signal/noise ratio.
  6. Investigate and resolve performance issues including slow queries, memory leaks, thread contention, and resource bottlenecks; partner with DBAs and developers to deploy fixes.
  7. Manage and support integrations with third‑party systems and SaaS platforms, troubleshooting data flows, API errors, authentication failures (OAuth, JWT), and message queue issues (Kafka, RabbitMQ).
  8. Create, maintain, and execute runbooks, playbooks, and technical documentation for common incidents, deployments, and recovery procedures to accelerate knowledge transfer.
  9. Support application deployments and releases in coordination with Release Management/DevOps, validating post‑deployment functionality and rolling back when necessary.
  10. Implement and maintain monitoring dashboards, synthetic tests, and health checks to proactively detect outages or degradation and to report SLA compliance.
  11. Perform routine application configuration, patching, and maintenance tasks in development, staging, and production environments following change control procedures.
  12. Execute database support tasks including query tuning, index maintenance, backup/restore validation, and schema updates in collaboration with DBAs.
  13. Automate repetitive support tasks using scripting (PowerShell, Bash, Python) and improve operational efficiency through small automation projects.
  14. Manage user access, roles, and permissions for applications and related systems while enforcing security policies and producing audit trails.
  15. Participate in on‑call rotations, respond to after‑hours incidents, and coordinate multi‑disciplinary incident response with clear communication to stakeholders.
  16. Liaise with product managers, software engineers, and QA to reproduce defects, provide debug logs, and verify fixes in pre‑production and production environments.
  17. Perform root cause analysis for recurring incidents, identify systemic issues, and propose long‑term remediation plans including architectural or process changes.
  18. Assist in capacity planning and performance forecasting by analyzing usage patterns, transaction volumes, and resource utilization trends.
  19. Validate and support integrations for data pipelines and ETL processes, troubleshooting batch failures and ensuring data integrity across systems.
  20. Provide technical support and training to business users and operations teams on new features, configuration changes, and application best practices.
  21. Participate in continuous improvement initiatives: post‑incident reviews, knowledge base growth, SLA/OLA refinement, and automation backlog grooming.
  22. Ensure compliance with corporate security, privacy, and change control standards, collaborating with InfoSec teams for vulnerability remediation and incident investigations.
  23. Maintain accurate ticket documentation, escalation notes, and change logs to enable effective handovers and auditability.
  24. Drive cross-functional communication during incidents: summarize impact, outline mitigation steps, and produce incident reports for stakeholders and leadership.

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 vendor escalation and management for third‑party application providers.
  • Help define and refine SLAs, operational metrics (MTTR, MTTD), and reporting for application availability.
  • Contribute to onboarding materials and onboarding sessions for new support hires.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Incident management and ITIL processes — incident triage, RCA, problem management, change control.
  • Application troubleshooting across full stack: front‑end, application server, middleware, and database layers.
  • SQL proficiency (SQL Server, Oracle, MySQL) — query analysis, performance tuning, backup/restore basics.
  • Scripting and automation (PowerShell, Bash, Python) to automate diagnostics, remediation, and deployments.
  • Experience with monitoring and observability tools (Splunk, Datadog, New Relic, AppDynamics) and log analysis.
  • Familiarity with REST and SOAP APIs, Web Services, authentication protocols (OAuth, SAML, JWT).
  • Cloud platform experience (AWS, Azure, GCP) — troubleshooting cloud services, storage, IAM, and networking.
  • Experience with ticketing and ITSM tools (ServiceNow, Jira Service Management, Zendesk).
  • Knowledge of CI/CD and release tooling (Jenkins, GitLab CI/CD, Azure DevOps) and deployment pipelines.
  • OS administration skills (Windows Server, Linux distributions — troubleshooting, services, security).
  • Networking fundamentals (TCP/IP, DNS, load balancers, proxies, firewalls) relevant to application support.
  • Familiarity with containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes) for modern application stacks.
  • Database administration fundamentals: indexing, query plans, connection pooling, replication troubleshooting.
  • Experience supporting SaaS and enterprise applications (ERP, CRM, custom line‑of‑business systems).
  • Version control (Git) and basic debugging of compiled and interpreted applications.

Soft Skills

  • Exceptional verbal and written communication for technical and non‑technical stakeholders.
  • Strong customer service orientation and ability to manage difficult conversations and expectations.
  • Analytical mindset and structured problem solving with attention to detail.
  • Prioritization and time management under pressure and during critical incidents.
  • Collaboration and team orientation with cross‑functional partners (Dev, QA, Ops, Product).
  • Adaptability to rapidly changing technologies and business priorities.
  • Documentation discipline: creating clear runbooks, KB articles, and post‑incident reports.
  • Proactive mindset for continuous improvement and automation of manual tasks.
  • Ability to train and mentor junior support staff and share expertise.
  • Resilience during on‑call rotations and incident response situations.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Associate degree in Information Technology or equivalent work experience in technical support roles.

Preferred Education:

  • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Information Systems, Software Engineering, or a related field.
  • Relevant certifications (ITIL Foundation, CompTIA Network+/A+, Microsoft/Azure, AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner or Associate).

Relevant Fields of Study:

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

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 2–5 years of hands‑on experience in application support, systems administration, or similar technical support roles; senior roles often require 5+ years.

Preferred:

  • 3–7 years supporting enterprise applications in production environments with demonstrated experience in incident management, cloud platforms, database troubleshooting, and scripting/automation.
  • Prior experience on an on‑call rotation and successful collaboration with development teams to deliver production fixes.
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