Job Description: Application Support Engineer (COTS)

Location Bangalore

Band 7

Position Overview

As the Application Support Engineer, you will bridge the gap between high-level architectural design and day-to-day production stability for our enterprise Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) application portfolio.

You will work with a team of senior engineers, collaborate deeply with infrastructure and security teams, and act as the primary technical liaison with software vendors to ensure minimal downtime and maximum operational efficiency.

Key Responsibilities

1. Architectural Governance & Support Strategy

- Production Architecture Ownership: Maintain the end-to-end architectural blueprints of all COTS applications, focusing heavily on integration points (APIs, middleware, ETL pipelines).
- Modernization & Scaling: Assess existing COTS setups for technical debt, bottlenecks, and single points of failure. Design and execute strategies to migrate legacy configurations to modern infrastructure (Cloud/Hybrid).
- Disaster Recovery (DR) & High Availability (HA): Architect, validate, and optimize DR/HA strategies specifically tailored to vendor-locking constraints.

2. Operational Leadership & Vendor Management

- Vendor Engineering Liaison: Act as the escalation point for Tier 3/4 support. Drive vendor engineering teams to deliver patches, bug fixes, and long-term product roadmaps that align with enterprise needs.
- Incident & Problem Management: Lead root-cause analysis (RCA) for complex, cross-platform incidents where vendor code intersects with internal systems.
- SLA & KPI Management: Establish and monitor technical performance metrics, ensuring systems meet defined Recovery Time Objectives (RTO) and Recovery Point Objectives (RPO).

3. Team Leadership & Mentorship

- Guide and mentor a team of support engineers and administrators,



fostering an automation-first mindset (SRE principles applied to COTS software).
- Establish best practices for environment management, configuration management, and deployment pipelines.

Required Qualifications & Experience

Experience:

- Total Experience: 10 to 12+ years in IT, with at least 4+ years in a Lead Architect or Principal Support role focused on production environments.
- COTS Expertise: Proven track record of architecting, supporting, and upgrading major enterprise COTS platforms (e.g., SAP, Salesforce, Oracle Suite, Pega, Misys, Guidewire, or industry-specific core vendor systems).
- Integration Experience: Deep understanding of integrating vendor software with bespoke internal systems using ESBs, API Gateways, MQ, or Kafka.

Technical Skills:

- Infrastructure & Cloud: Robust experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP) and how COTS applications behave in containerized or cloud-native environments.
- Database & Systems: Advanced troubleshooting skills in enterprise databases (Oracle, MS SQL, PostgreSQL) and OS levels (Linux/Windows Server).
- Observability: Expertise in setting up enterprise monitoring and APM tools (e.g., Dynatrace, Datadog, Splunk, AppDynamics, New relic) to map complex COTS dependencies.
- Scripting & Automation: Proficiency in PowerShell, Bash, Python, or Ansible to automate routine vendor maintenance tasks (log rotation, health checks, patch deployments).

Soft Skills:

- Vendor Diplomacy: Exceptional ability to negotiate with and hold software vendors accountable during high-pressure outages.
- Crisis Communication: Ability to translate complex architectural issues into business impact statements for C-suite stakeholders during critical incidents.

Preferred Qualifications

- Certifications in Enterprise Architecture (e.g., TOGAF).
- Cloud Architecture certifications (AWS Certified Solutions Architect, Azure Solutions Architect, etc.).
- ITIL v4 Framework certification.

📌 Application Support Engineer (COTS) (Karnataka)
🏢 Sass Innovations
📍 Karnataka