Function Application Support

Experience 10+ years in IT, including 5+ years managing Application Support teams

Core Expertise .NET diagnostics, Azure application support, ITIL processes and KPI management

1. Role Purpose

The Application Support Lead is accountable for leading the Application Support team for business-critical enterprise applications. The role manages Application Support Engineers, ensures adherence to defined processes and service targets, directs technical investigation during incidents, and uses support data to drive application and product improvements. The role is expected to identify gaps and initiate corrective action independently, without waiting for escalations, complaints or requests from others.

The candidate must have at least 5 years of direct experience managing Application Support teams, current hands-on technical fluency in reading, tracing and diagnosing issues in Microsoft .NET applications, working knowledge of Microsoft Azure, and demonstrated ownership of Incident and Problem Management activities. The role works with Product, Development, DevOps, Cloud, business stakeholders and external providers.

2. Key Responsibilities

Application Support Team Leadership

· Lead, coach and mentor Application Support Engineers across daily operations, incidents and improvement activities. Work issues and complex incidents alongside them, demonstrating the troubleshooting approach in practice and guiding engineers directly when they are stuck, not simply assigning and reviewing their work.

· Define responsibilities, measurable objectives, competency expectations and development plans for each team member, including a structured technical uplift plan for engineers without a software development background.

· Conduct one-to-one meetings, technical case reviews and knowledge sessions; track agreed actions to completion.

· Allocate work, maintain support coverage, define escalation paths and ensure documented handovers across a 24/7, multi-time-zone support model, including weekend and public-holiday cover for the supported platforms.

· Join the On-Call rotation as the senior technical contact for P1 and P2 incidents outside business hours and be available for major incident bridges when business impact requires it.

· Monitor and challenge team performance against service targets, process compliance and improvement commitments, raising and addressing gaps as they appear and not only at scheduled review points.

Process Governance

· Own the team’s Incident, Problem, Service Request and Knowledge Management activities.

· Govern the team’s compliance with the organization’s Change Management process; this role does not own the enterprise Change Management process.

· Enforce and verify that engineers follow agreed SLAs, OLAs, priority definitions, escalation procedures, runbooks and communication templates, intervening as soon as a deviation occurs.

· Define and agree on documented decision rights for the support team: a pre-approved action list engineers may execute on their own authority, and the thresholds at which SME, vendor or management escalation are genuinely required. Review and widen these rights as the team’s capability grows.

· Audit incident updates against the cadence required for each priority level (for example, hourly for P1), and act on updates that are missed or that repeat the previous one without new information, a decision or a next step.

· Initiate and lead operational, problem, change and service improvement reviews, bring the agenda and proposed actions, and call a review when the data warrants it.

· Build out and keep current runbooks, knowledge articles, support models and escalation matrices, prioritizing the gaps that repeatedly leave engineers without clear troubleshooting guidance.

Incident and Problem Management· Lead incident triage and coordination, ensuring each incident has an owner, priority, next action and stakeholder update time.

· Lead troubleshooting directly across application, database,



API, integration and application-layer Azure components, taking point on complex or escalated incidents and pairing with engineers on the diagnosis.

· Establish reproduction as a standard triage step: engineers must attempt to simulate the reported failure in a test or lower environment, and record the reason when it cannot be reproduced, instead of stopping at database, API and log checks. Model this behavior until it becomes routine.

· Own customer and application incidents end to end. Where an incident originates in infrastructure, platform or cloud layers, establish the application-side impact and diagnosis, then hand the technical resolution to the Operation Lead (DevOps and Cloud Operations) while retaining incident coordination and stakeholder communication until closure.

· Lead Root Cause Analysis for recurring or high-impact incidents; document root cause, corrective actions, preventive actions, owners and due dates.

· Hold a post-incident review for every P1 and P2 incident within five working days of mitigation, whether it recurred or met a formal RCA trigger.

· Drive corrective and preventive actions to closure and verify their effect on recurrence or restoration time.

KPI, SLA and Reporting

· Define and report Application Support KPIs agreed with stakeholders.

· Track incident volume by priority and application, SLA achievement, acknowledgement time, restoration time, ticket age, repeat incidents, problem backlog, availability and action closure.

· Publish service reports show results, target, variance, cause, owner and corrective action for each KPI below target.

· Escalate overdue actions, unresolved ownership gaps and service risks through agreed governance channels at the point they are identified.

.NET and Azure Technical Leadership

· Review and troubleshoot applications built using C#, ASP.NET, .NET/.NET Core, REST APIs and IIS.

· Use source code, logs, SQL queries, traces and telemetry to distinguish code, data, configuration, integration and infrastructure issues.

· Guide engineers in using Azure Monitor, Application Insights and Log Analytics.

· Apply working knowledge of Azure App Service, Azure Functions, Azure SQL, Storage, Key Vault, identity and access, networking and integrations.

· Engage Development and DevOps before each release to shape support plans, validation steps, rollback procedures and post-deployment monitoring.

Product and Application Improvement

· Convert recurring incidents, support effort and customer-reported issues into documented improvement proposals.

· Present Product and Development teams with business impact, recurrence data and a recommended priority for fixes, and pursue each proposal to a decision.

· Define support acceptance criteria for recent or changed applications, including monitoring, alerts, runbooks, support contacts, known errors and knowledge transfer.

· Identify repetitive diagnostics, reporting and service requests for automation and document the expected benefit.

· Maintain an improvement register with business reasons, owner, due date, status and measured result, prioritized using KPI and incident trends.

Stakeholder and Vendor Management

· Act as the primary Application Support contact for service performance, incidents, risks and improvement actions.

· Issue stakeholder updates at the cadence required by the incident’s priority, each stating the issue, business impact, current action, owner, next update time and any decision required. Every update must carry new information, a changed assessment or an explicit decision request,



never a restatement of the last one.

· Coordinate actions across Product, Development, DevOps, Cloud and external providers, working with the Operation Lead on incidents that span application and infrastructure scope so that ownership is never ambiguous during an active incident.

3. Mandatory Experience and Skills

· Minimum 12 years of IT experience, including hands-on enterprise Application Support experience.

· Minimum 5 years directly managing, coaching and developing Application Support teams, or equivalent experience as a senior/technical lead with formal responsibility for mentoring and developing support engineers.

· Technical involvement must be current: the candidate must have been hands-on in diagnosing production incidents within the last two years, not solely in a coordinating or reporting capacity.

· Experience leading support for business-critical customer-facing or business-facing applications.

· Mandatory hands-on technical fluency in C# and Microsoft .NET applications, with the ability to read and trace application code, interpret logs, traces and telemetry, and diagnose issues directly. Prior software development experience is valued, but this is a diagnostics and support role, not a development role.

· Proven Incident and Problem Management ownership, including incident coordination, RCA, action tracking and recurring-incident reduction.

· Experience governing Application Support compliance with Change Management procedures.

· Experience defining and reporting SLAs and Application Support KPIs.

· Working knowledge of Azure-hosted applications and Azure monitoring tools.

· Strong SQL skills for diagnostics and query troubleshooting; SQL Server experience is mandatory.

· Working knowledge of REST APIs, JSON, IIS, CI/CD pipelines, Git-based source control and release controls.

· Experience working with Product, Development, DevOps, Cloud, business stakeholders and external providers.

4. Leadership Requirements

· Build technical capability in a junior team, using incidents, case reviews, process compliance and KPI results as the basis for structured coaching and measurable competency growth.

· Make structured decisions during incidents and maintain clear action ownership and update times, exercising the agreed decision authority without defaulting to SME approval.

· Explain technical issues, business impact, risks and required decisions to technical and non-technical stakeholders.

· Identify capability, process, communication and tool gaps in the support team and open the corrective discussion with engineers, stakeholders and management without being prompted.

5. Preferred Qualifications

· Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science Engineering, Information Technology or a related discipline.

· ITIL 4 Foundation or higher ITIL certification.

· Microsoft Azure certification such as AZ-104, AZ-204, AZ-305 or AZ-400.

· Experience with Azure DevOps, GitHub and an enterprise IT service management platform.

· Experience operating a 24/7 or follow-the-sun support model for globally used platforms.

6. Measures of Success

· Support coverage, workload allocation, handovers and escalation paths are documented and followed, with 24/7 critical-incident cover demonstrably in place across time zones.

· Incident and Problem records contain ownership, root cause, actions, due dates and closure evidence.

· Repeat incidents, overdue tickets and restoration time improve against agreed baselines and targets.

· SLA and KPI reports are published on schedule with corrective actions for missed targets.

· Required update cadence is met, updates carry new information, and post-incident reviews for P1 and P2 incidents are completed within the agreed window with their actions closed.

· Runbooks, knowledge articles, monitoring and support contacts are available and reviewed for each supported application.

· Product, automation and process improvements raised from support data are tracked to decision and closure.

📌 Operations Lead (Pune)
🏢 NCSi
📍 Pune