Application Support Engineer Lead

Key Responsibilities

• Cadet Mentorship: Act as the primary technical mentor and coach for Cadet Engineers, accelerating their transition from early-career graduates to proficient L2 support engineers.
• Skill Development: Design and oversee training paths for the cadets, focusing specifically on legacy application logic (BSS), structured debugging, and modern database patterns.
• Performance Management: Set clear KPIs regarding ticket quality, SLA compliance, and documentation standards while conducting regular 1-on-1s and performance reviews.
• Resource Allocation: Manage team shifts, on-call schedules, and ticket assignments to ensure optimal support coverage and prevent team burnout.

• Gatekeeping & Quality Assurance: Review comprehensive "evidence packs" created by Cadets before escalation to L3 vendors, ensuring steps to reproduce, logs, and correlation IDs are flawless.
• SLA & Clock Management: Oversee the escalation clocks and communication cadences with the Service Control Tower and incident bridges during critical P1/P2 crises.
• Bridge Leadership: Represent the Cadet team on major incident bridges, providing calm leadership, clear technical updates, and disciplined execution.
• Fix Validation: Oversee the validation of vendor-provided hotfixes in UAT/pre-prod environments before signing off on live production deployment.

• AI Policy Compliance: Serve as the ultimate gatekeeper for the team's "vibe coding" outputs, ensuring no Cadet pastes AI-generated code directly into production without strict review.
• Code & Script Review: Review and approve AI-generated SQL queries, automation scripts, and troubleshooting trees tested by Cadets in safe environments.
• Prompt Library Curation: Standardize and maintain the team's reusable library of validated AI prompts, templates, and scripts to improve team velocity safely.
• Risk Mitigation: Ensure team compliance with data security policies (e.g., ensuring no proprietary code or PII is pasted into public AI models).

• Runbook Modernization: Lead the initiative to transform legacy BSS knowledge into highly accurate, modern runbooks and Known Error Databases (KEDB).
• Problem Management: Analyze ticket trends to identify recurring system bugs, raise Problem records, and collaborate with L3/Development teams to drive permanent remediation.
• Shift-Left Strategy: Partner with L1 (Helpdesk/NOC) to build better documentation, enabling them to resolve basic issues and reduce unnecessary escalations to the Cadet team.

• Operational Readiness: Ensure the Cadet team is fully prepared for new software releases by reviewing smoke test checklists, cutover schedules, and rollback plans.
• Hypercare Command: Direct team activities during hypercare windows, ensuring rapid triage of post-release anomalies and safeguarding critical business transactions.

Job Requirements

• Education: Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, IT, Engineering, or a related field.
• Experience: 4–6+ years of experience in Application Support (L2/L3) or Software Development, with at least 1–2 years in a senior, team lead, or supervisory capacity.
• Legacy Domain Expertise: Proven experience troubleshooting and maintaining legacy applications (e.g., PowerBuilder, older database patterns, complex stored procedures, batch jobs).
• AI Tool Fluency: Deep comfort with AI-assisted productivity tools (LLMs, Copilots) and a demonstrated ability to evaluate AI-generated code/scripts for safety, security, and accuracy.
• SLA Management: Strong background in structured troubleshooting, incident management, and working under high-pressure SLA environments.
• Work Setup: Willing to work On-site (with rotational on-call / after-hours hypercare support as needed).

• Deep capability in tracing and debugging complex stored procedures and managing database scripts.
• Strong technical roots in structured application logging and system architecture analysis.
• Excellent communication skills with the ability to provide calm, clear technical updates during high-stakes outages.
• A strong passion for coaching junior talent and molding early-career professionals into a high-performing engineering cohort.

• ITIL Foundation or ITIL Intermediate (Managing Professional stream).
• Cloud Fundamentals (AWS, Azure, or GCP).
• Advanced SQL or Database Administration certification.