JOB SUMMARY

As a Senior Application Operations Engineer, you’ll make sure Counter Terrorism Policing has the tech to do its job. Join us, and you won’t just be supporting applications – you’ll be helping to protect the UK. This is a great opportunity to join us at the Customer Service Centre (CSC), which provides IT services for the Counter Terrorism Policing network.
This role is aligned to the Senior Application Operations Engineer role set out within the Digital and Data Profession Capability Framework (DDAT).
Reporting to the Applications Team Manager, you’ll support all CSC applications – operational, Business As Usual and project tasks. Day to day, you’ll deal with service requests, changes, problems and incidents as part of a 2nd line team. When tricky issues arise, you’ll draw on your experience to problem-solve and identify the cause.
As a senior member of the team, you’ll also take on some additional tasks: implementing an ITIL-aligned Application Management strategy and mentoring junior analysts. In effect, you’ll be a subject matter expert, tackling escalations and developing our talent.
As you work, you’ll be learning new IT skills and liaising with all kinds of policing contacts. You’ll also be working on-call, so a flexible approach is essential.
We’re looking for an experienced Applications professional who inspires trust. Degree-educated (or equivalent), you’ll bring strong technical expertise in application design and development, including agile methodologies, database design and infrastructure technologies. A background in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) will be advantageous too.
However, equally important are customer focus and strong communication skills. Adept at connecting with others, you’ll discuss solutions, update stakeholders and deal with suppliers every day.
Join us, and you’ll be part of a team of engineers covering core working hours weekdays from the CSC operations centre and on call (roughly 1 week in 4). The role is office-based with occasional opportunities to work from home.

The post holder will be required to do the following:

• Working within a service team monitoring components such as web servers, applications servers, log files, disk space and MS-SQL databases
• A point of escalation for all Application related issues within the Application Support team.
• Working as part of a second line support function following incident management through to incident resolution. Natural problem solving with ability to apply previous experience to new problems working towards route cause analysis.
• Ensuring the entire application estate aligns within Application Lifecycle Management.
• Working with third party suppliers, stakeholders and departmental ICT teams to help deliver patch/release of applications while coordinating vendor support.
• Ensuring the reliability, availability, and performance of software systems through a combination of software engineering and systems administration principles.
• Responsible for monitoring, automating, and improving the operational aspects of software systems, including incident response, capacity planning, and performance tuning
• Understanding of ITIL process, incident management, change management and problem management including working to strict SLAs.
• Maintaining middleware such as; IIS, MS-SQL Server, Active Directory, ASP and. NET, including troubleshooting, performance tuning, basic querying and resolving bottlenecks.
• Working on cloud and container technologies and Kubernetes.
• Design, development, testing and deployment of Tableau Dashboards.
• Report writing with tools such as PowerShell, JavaScript, HTML and SQL.
• Ownership of application backup, restores and the Application Disaster Recovery (DR) process.
• Daily support of COTS and WEB based software applications with an emphasis on the ability to problem solve.
• Creating knowledge base articles and up-skilling other members of the team following resolution.
• Ability to understand business logic, technical tools and be an analytic thinker.
• Strong customer focus – understanding the needs of the internal and external customer and keeping them in mind when taking actions or making decisions.
• Able to attend Senior User groups nationally on behalf of the CSC and articulate complex technical issues to both peers and non-technical staff.