Senior Application Support Engineer

THE ROLE

We are looking for a Senior Application Support Engineer who combines strong hands-on L2 expertise with a natural sense of ownership over the support process. In this role, you will triage and resolve complex product issues, lead the team through high-severity incidents, and play an active part in developing junior engineers and improving how the team operates. You will be the senior presence on shift — the person the team looks to for technical direction, process discipline, and composure under pressure.

This role reports to the Application Support Manager and is based within ZestIOT’s Technical Assistance Center (TAC).

REQUIRED SKILLS & EXPERIENCE

- 4–8 years overall, with 2+ years in a senior application support role at a software product company in a 24x7 shift environment.
- Proven hands-on L2 application support experience — triaging, debugging, and resolving complex product defects and integration issues. Ability to prepare thorough diagnostic context before escalating to L3/Engineering. L3 exposure is a plus.
- Experience supporting a company’s own software product, including product-specific incident patterns, release cycles, hotfix coordination, and customer-impacting defect management.
- Experience acting as Incident Manager during high-severity situations: coordinating cross-team resolution, managing an on-call SME roster and escalation matrix, and communicating clearly with senior enterprise customer stakeholders under pressure.
- Demonstrated ability to guide and develop junior support engineers — coaching on troubleshooting approach, enforcing process adherence, and building team capability over time.
- Hands-on experience with monitoring and log analysis tools such as Grafana, Datadog, ELK Stack, Cloud Watch, New Relic, or equivalents.
- Familiarity with microservices, message queues (RabbitMQ/Kafka), caching (Redis), and distributed systems.
- Understanding of ITIL frameworks covering incident, problem, and change management in a product support context.
- Proficiency with Jira Service Management or an equivalent ticketing platform, with strong techno-functional communication skills.
- Experience contributing to process improvement — identifying repetitive tasks, driving automation or optimisation, and reducing team effort over time.
- Ability to build and maintain runbooks, troubleshooting guides, and knowledge base articles.

WHO SHOULD NOT APPLY

- Candidates with backgrounds exclusively in network, telecom, or OS/infrastructure support — application-layer expertise is mandatory.
- Profiles without hands-on L2 application support experience.
- Candidates from SI/services delivery or hardware support backgrounds.
- L1 or Senior L1 profiles — this role requires demonstrated L2 expertise and the ability to lead and develop a team.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

Team Guidance & Shift Ownership

- Take ownership of the support process during your shift — ensure ticket prioritisation, clean handoffs, and adherence to defined workflows. Act as the first point of escalation for junior engineers on shift.
- Coach and develop junior team members: guide troubleshooting approach, review diagnostics quality, and build individual capability over time.
- Motivate the team during high-pressure periods; model the standards of thoroughness and communication expected of the function.
- Contribute to shift scheduling in coordination with the Application Support Manager; maintain zero unplanned coverage gaps.

L2 Support & Incident Management

- Own hands-on L2 triaging, troubleshooting, and resolution of complex product issues. Escalate to L3/Engineering with full diagnostic context when required.
- Lead high-severity incident management — activate the on-call SME roster, work the escalation matrix, coordinate cross-team resolution, and provide timely, composed communication to senior enterprise customer stakeholders throughout.
- Deliver incident reports and post-mortems to the Application Support Manager. Perform RCA and drive corrective and preventive actions. Track bug escalations and hotfix coordination with Engineering.

Process Improvement & Knowledge Management

- Monitor L2 ticket queues; ensure SLA adherence and…