Senior Application Operations Engineer

Description

The company is looking for a senior engineer to own the performance, uptime and steady improvement of business-critical digital services.

The role is hands-on and combines application operations, observability and production support. You will use monitoring and performance data to catch problems before users are affected.

Your work covers AWS, Kubernetes and containerised platforms, with a focus on Dynatrace, distributed tracing and DQL.

You will also help resolve incidents, run root cause analysis, and support deployments, releases and service changes alongside developers, the Service Desk and customer teams.

You will sit in the Service Reliability Group, the company's Managed Services team that runs business-critical services for public sector, financial services and commercial clients. The company's Oracle practice has 700+ specialists, including 500+ certified professionals, working on large multi-pillar Oracle Cloud programmes.

Responsibilities

• Keep critical applications and services healthy, available and performing well day to day.
• Monitor, investigate and tune application performance in Dynatrace, using distributed tracing and DQL.
• Build and refine dashboards, alerts and operational metrics.
• Spot performance, availability, latency and capacity problems early, before they affect services.
• Lead technical incident triage, root cause analysis and post-incident reviews.
• Take complex production issues through to a fix or an effective workaround.
• Work across distributed systems, APIs, microservices and cloud-native applications.
• Work with development from defects and UAT through to deployment across the release lifecycle.
• Assess and coordinate changes, releases and migrations into live environments.
• Handle incidents, service requests and operational work in Jira ITSM.
• Use trends and operational data to guide problem management, capacity planning and continual service improvement.
• Write and maintain technical documentation, operating procedures and knowledge articles.
• Build good working relationships with technical staff, users and customer stakeholders.

Requirements

• Solid APM and observability experience across metrics, logs, traces, alerting and dashboards.
• Hands-on experience investigating production incidents and performance problems.
• Good grasp of distributed systems, microservices, APIs and web application architecture.
• Working knowledge of AWS, Kubernetes, containers and cloud-native hosting.
• Understanding of load balancing, auto-scaling and cloud networking.
• Experience with incident, problem, change and release management.
• Practical knowledge of the SDLC and of supporting applications through production releases.
• Skill at root cause analysis and at turning findings into practical improvements.
• Ability to explain technical risks and recommendations to non-technical audiences.
• Experience in ITIL, Agile and/or PRINCE2 environments.
• A proactive approach with a focus on reliability and continuous improvement.
• Great to have: hands-on Dynatrace experience, especially distributed tracing and DQL.
• Great to have: AWS experience across EKS, EC2, Lambda and related services.
• Great to have: Oracle and PostgreSQL database knowledge.
• Great to have: exposure to Java, Angular and JavaScript applications.
• Great to have: Jira Service Management experience.
• Great to have: experience connecting observability/APM tools with ITSM platforms.
• Great to have: familiarity with Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) and operational excellence practices.

Conditions

This is a hybrid role, with occasional travel to your nearest base office.

The company recruits internally and does not accept agency candidates.

The company is an equal opportunities employer.

Benefits

• Quarterly performance-related profit share.
• Flexible hybrid or remote working.
• Pension, private healthcare and life assurance cover.
• Great Place to Work certified for 10+ years in a row.
• Quarterly Pathways Career Development reviews, plus leadership programmes and mentorship.
• A significant training budget for certifications and further education.
• Annual excellence awards and a peer recognition platform.
• Enhanced maternity and paternity leave policies.
• Active ESG and CSR initiatives, including volunteering, fundraising and diversity, inclusion and belonging programmes.