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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Web Application Support Engineer

💰 $70,000 - $120,000 (USD)

ITSupportWeb EngineeringDevOps

🎯 Role Definition

The Web Application Support Engineer is responsible for ensuring the availability, performance, and reliability of customer-facing and internal web applications. This role focuses on 24/7 production support and incident response, deep troubleshooting across full stacks (frontend, backend, database, network), automation of repetitive operational tasks, and close collaboration with development, QA, and DevOps teams to reduce mean time to resolution (MTTR) and prevent recurrence. The Web Application Support Engineer drives root cause analysis, implements fixes and workarounds, improves monitoring and observability, and maintains Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and escalation procedures.

Core SEO keywords: Web Application Support Engineer, production support, incident management, root cause analysis, monitoring, DevOps, SaaS support, application performance, CI/CD, AWS, Linux.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Junior Web Developer or Frontend/Backend Developer
  • Systems Administrator or Linux/Windows Support Engineer
  • Technical Support / Application Support Analyst

Advancement To:

  • Senior Web Application Support Engineer
  • Site Reliability Engineer (SRE)
  • DevOps Engineer
  • Production/Platform Engineer
  • Technical Lead / Engineering Manager

Lateral Moves:

  • QA/Automation Engineer
  • Release/Build Engineer
  • Cloud Operations Engineer

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Serve as a primary point of contact for production incidents affecting web applications; lead incident response, perform rapid triage, coordinate cross-functional teams, and drive to resolution while communicating status to stakeholders according to SLA and business impact.
  • Troubleshoot complex issues across the full application stack (JavaScript/TypeScript frontend, Node.js/Java/.NET/Python backend, REST APIs, relational and NoSQL databases) using logs, metrics, traces and interactive debugging tools.
  • Perform root cause analysis (RCA) for incidents, write clear post-incident reports with corrective actions, and implement remediation plans to eliminate recurrence and improve platform resilience.
  • Maintain and operate production web application infrastructure on cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, GCP) including EC2/VMs, containers (Docker), orchestration (Kubernetes/EKS/GKE/AKS), load balancers, autoscaling and networking.
  • Design and implement monitoring, alerting, and observability using tools like Datadog, New Relic, Prometheus/Grafana, ELK/Opensearch or Splunk to ensure effective detection, escalation and proactive response to application health issues.
  • Manage application deployments, rollbacks and release validation in CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, CircleCI), ensuring safe release practices, canary/blue-green deployment strategies and zero-downtime upgrades.
  • Analyze and tune application performance and database queries (Postgres, MySQL, MongoDB) to optimize latency, throughput and resource usage under production load.
  • Implement and maintain application logging, structured logs, distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry, Jaeger) and context propagation to speed up distributed troubleshooting and incident correlation.
  • Support and enforce security best practices for web applications including TLS/SSL certificate management, authentication/authorization flows (OAuth, SAML, JWT), secure storage of secrets and timely patching of dependencies.
  • Execute routine operational tasks including backups, database restores, capacity planning, resource provisioning and maintenance windows while minimizing business impact.
  • Automate repetitive support tasks and runbooks using scripts (Bash, Python, PowerShell) and configuration management tools (Ansible, Terraform) to improve repeatability and reliability.
  • Maintain and evolve runbooks, KB articles, and runbook automation so that common incidents can be resolved faster and by tier-1 support when appropriate.
  • Participate in and rotate through on-call schedules, manage escalations, and ensure handoffs and documentation for after-hours incidents and follow-ups.
  • Collaborate with software engineers to reproduce bugs in staging/test environments, validate fixes, and provide feedback on code-level issues that cause production instability.
  • Coordinate with Product, Security and Customer Success teams to investigate customer-reported issues, provide timely updates, and manage incident communications and post-mortems.
  • Manage integrations with third-party services and APIs; monitor third-party dependencies and implement graceful degradation or fallback strategies when external services fail.
  • Monitor and remediate configuration drift and environment inconsistencies between development, staging and production that lead to production-only issues.
  • Improve reliability and observability by driving small platform and code changes, feature flag best practices, and resilience patterns (circuit breakers, retries, bulkheads).
  • Validate and verify data integrity issues caused by application bugs or operational errors, perform forensic analysis and implement corrective actions to restore user data where possible.
  • Evaluate and recommend tooling and process improvements (ticketing systems, incident management tools like Jira/ServiceNow, on-call paging via PagerDuty) to accelerate support workflows and reduce MTTR.
  • Provide mentoring and training to junior support staff, create onboarding materials, and help build a knowledge-driven support 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.
  • Build and maintain technical documentation, runbooks, and support playbooks for frequently encountered production issues and recovery procedures.
  • Conduct regular post-incident reviews and track remediation items to closure in the engineering backlog.
  • Assist with capacity and performance planning for traffic spikes, seasonal loads and growth forecasting.
  • Help define and maintain SLAs, SLOs and error budgets for web applications and report on reliability metrics to leadership.
  • Support feature flag management and release toggles to minimize blast radius during new feature rollouts.
  • Participate in security incident response as needed, including collecting evidence and coordinating remediation with InfoSec.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Strong experience in production incident management, incident response, escalation and root cause analysis for web applications and services.
  • Proficiency with Linux server administration, system diagnostics (strace, top, vmstat), and networking fundamentals (TCP/IP, load balancers, DNS, HTTP/S).
  • Hands-on experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS, Azure or GCP) and core services: EC2/VMs, S3, RDS, VPC, IAM and auto-scaling.
  • Experience with containerization (Docker) and orchestration (Kubernetes/EKS/GKE/AKS) including troubleshooting pods, services and ingress controllers.
  • Solid understanding of CI/CD and deployment pipelines (Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions) and experience validating production releases and rollbacks.
  • Proficient in at least one scripting/programming language used for automation and troubleshooting (Python, Bash, PowerShell, Node.js).
  • Strong skills in application monitoring and observability: metrics, logs, traces using Datadog, New Relic, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK/Opensearch or Splunk.
  • Deep familiarity with web technologies and protocols (HTTP/HTTPS, REST, WebSockets), frontend/backend stacks (React/Angular/Vue, Node.js/Java/.NET/Python) and JSON/XML payloads.
  • Experience with relational and NoSQL databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis) including query tuning and backups/restores.
  • Experience with security and auth mechanisms (OAuth2, SAML, JWT), SSL/TLS lifecycle and secrets management (Vault, AWS Secrets Manager).
  • Practical knowledge of performance profiling and load testing tools (JMeter, Gatling, k6) to validate performance fixes and anticipate bottlenecks.
  • Familiarity with configuration management and infrastructure as code (Terraform, CloudFormation, Ansible) to manage reproducible environments.
  • Competence with ticketing and ITSM tools (Jira, ServiceNow) and incident management platforms (PagerDuty, Opsgenie).
  • Ability to read and interpret application logs, stack traces, garbage collection logs and JVM/.NET runtime diagnostics when applicable.
  • Experience with SRE/DevOps practices: error budgets, SLIs/SLOs, blameless post-mortems and runbook automation.

(These hard skills reflect typical job requirements for a Web Application Support Engineer; include keywords for SEO and LLM parsing.)

Soft Skills

  • Strong analytical problem-solving skills with the ability to decompose complex incidents into actionable steps.
  • Calm under pressure and effective in high-severity incident situations; excellent crisis communication and stakeholder management.
  • Clear written and verbal communication for incident summaries, postmortems, and technical documentation.
  • Collaborative mindset: works well across engineering, QA, product, security and customer-facing teams.
  • Prioritization and time-management skills to balance reactive incident work with proactive reliability improvements.
  • Customer-focused attitude with an emphasis on delivering timely updates and transparent communication to internal and external customers.
  • Mentoring and knowledge-sharing skills to uplift the support team and reduce single points of operational knowledge.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

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

Preferred Education:

  • Bachelor’s plus relevant certifications (AWS Certified SysOps/DevOps Engineer, Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA), ITIL Foundation) or a Master’s degree in a related discipline.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Software Engineering
  • Information Systems
  • Information Technology
  • Computer Engineering
  • Cybersecurity / Network Engineering (beneficial)

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 2–5 years of hands-on experience in application support, site reliability, platform engineering, or DevOps roles for web applications.

Preferred:

  • 3–7+ years supporting production web-scale applications, with demonstrated experience in incident management, cloud platforms (AWS/Azure/GCP), Kubernetes, observability tooling, and automation.
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