Application Support Lead

Location: Bonn, Germany (we are find with candidate based any where in Germany)

20% Hybrid is fine (from office)

1 year Fixed term contract

Candidates working in the supporting roles must be flexible for 8 hour working shift between 7am and 8pm CET

Job Overview

Position Overview

The Application Support Lead manages the day-to-day operations of the application support team to ensure high availability, performance, and stability of critical business applications. This role acts as a bridge between technical support engineers, development teams, IT infrastructure, and business stakeholders. The Application Support Lead oversees incident, problem, and change management processes, enforces Service Level Agreements (SLAs), drives root cause analysis (RCA), and leads continuous improvement initiatives across application environments.

Key Responsibilities

Team Leadership & Operations Management

• Lead, mentor, and guide a team of Level 2 (L2) and Level 3 (L3) support engineers, fostering a collaborative, customer-centric culture.
• Manage shift schedules, on-call rotations, and resource allocation to ensure 24/7/365 or follow-the-sun operational coverage where required.
• Set clear performance objectives, conduct regular 1-on-1s, and support technical upskilling and career development for team members.
• Manage vendor and partner relationships for third-party tools, applications, or outsourced support tiers.
• Serve as an escalation point for critical (Severity 1 / Severity 2) application issues and service outages.
• Facilitate crisis calls and bridge communications during outages, coordinating with infrastructure, DevOps, development, and external vendors to expedite restoration.
• Deliver timely and professional stakeholder communication to business executives, internal users, and end customers during major incidents.
• Ensure strict adherence to defined Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and Operational Level Agreements (OLAs).

Problem Management & Root Cause Analysis (RCA)

• Lead thorough post-incident reviews (PIRs) and root cause investigations for recurring or critical defects.
• Partner with product and software development teams to prioritize permanent bug fixes, code enhancements, and tech-debt remediation in development backlogs.
• Identify operational bottlenecks and implement preventative measures to reduce ticket volume and recurrence.

Change & Release Management

• Participate in Change Advisory Board (CAB) reviews to evaluate the operational risks of proposed software releases, system patches, and infrastructure updates.
• Validate production readiness, roll-back plans, and deployment runbooks before release sign-off.
• Coordinate post-deployment application health checks and ensure monitoring coverage is updated for new features.

Monitoring, Tooling & Automation

• Maintain and improve application monitoring, alerting, and logging infrastructure across environments.
• Drive operational automation by designing scripts, runbooks, and self-healing mechanisms to eliminate manual, repetitive tasks (toil).
• Establish and govern the team’s standard operating procedures (SOPs), runbooks, and knowledge-base documentation.

Reporting & Governance

• Compile, track, and present Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) including Mean Time to Detect (MTTD), Mean Time to Resolve (MTTR), SLA compliance rate, and incident volumes.
• Lead operational review meetings with key business stakeholders, highlighting system health, recent incidents, trends, and improvement roadmaps.

Required Qualifications & Experience

• Education: Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Software Engineering, or a related field (or equivalent professional experience).
• Experience:
• 10-12+ years of hands-on experience in application support, production support, or IT service operations.
• Process Knowledge: Strong understanding of ITIL frameworks (Incident, Problem, Change, and Release Management). ITIL Foundation or higher certification is strongly preferred.
• Technical Proficiency:
• Databases: Solid ability to write and optimize complex SQL queries for relational databases (e.g. PostgreSQL, MySQL, Oracle, MS SQL Server) to troubleshoot data anomalies.
• Operating Systems & Scripting: Practical familiarity with Linux/Unix shell environments and scripting languages (e.g. Bash, Python, PowerShell).
• Architecture: Working knowledge of modern multi-tier web architectures, microservices, REST/SOAP APIs, message queues (e.g. Kafka, RabbitMQ), and network protocols (HTTP/S, DNS, TCP/IP).
• Cloud Platforms: Experience supporting applications hosted on cloud environments such as AWS, Microsoft Azure, or GCP.
• Monitoring & Observability: Hands-on experience with application monitoring and logging platforms (e.g. Splunk, Datadog, Dynatrace, New Relic, Grafana, ELK Stack).
• ITSM Tools: Proficiency in enterprise ticketing and service management systems (e.g. ServiceNow, Jira Service Management).
• Experience working within Agile/Scrum delivery environments and interacting with CI/CD deployment pipelines (e.g. Jenkins, GitLab CI, GitHub Actions).
• Domain Skills : Hospital Information Systems (HIS) product Domain expertise. Expertise with iMED product domain will be a plus
• Exposure to Cloud platforms
• Strong crisis management skills with the ability to maintain composure, structure, and clarity during high-stress outages.
• Excellent verbal and written communication skills with the ability to translate complex technical jargon into clear business impact for non-technical stakeholders.