Application Support Lead

About The Role

Balfour Beatty is looking for an Application Support Lead to take ownership of our HR and Payroll application landscape. In this pivotal role, you’ll ensure the stability, compliance, and performance of the systems that underpin how we pay, develop, and support our people across Balfour Beatty.

• Lead, mentor and develop a team of HR/Payroll Application Analysts, building a high‑performing, service‑focused team.
• Oversee second‑line support for HR/Payroll systems, ensuring timely resolution of incidents, service requests, and enhancements.
• Deliver clear, proactive communication to HR and Payroll teams, ensuring visibility of risks, progress, and change activity.
• Manage system compliance, ensuring applications meet legal, statutory, tax, and audit requirements.
• Coordinate the scheduling and deployment of patches, upgrades, and annual statutory updates.
• Drive continuous improvement by identifying opportunities to optimise system functionality and streamline processes.
• Support the definition, testing, and delivery of enhancements, change requests, and new features.
• Act as a trusted technical advisor to HR, Payroll, and business stakeholders, representing HR/Payroll systems in cross‑functional forums.
• Liaise with third‑party suppliers to progress fixes, roadmap discussions, and platform improvements.
• Provide escalation support and guidance for complex, cross‑functional technical issues.

• Strong understanding of HR & Payroll processes within Oracle E‑Business Suite (ideally R12).
• Hands‑on experience with Oracle HR, Payroll, OTL, SSHR, and related modules.
• Proven experience with forms customisation and Oracle Reports.
• Ability to analyse and troubleshoot PL/SQL logic, concurrent programs, fast formulas, workflows, and flexfields.
• Confident in performing data investigations using SQL.
• Experience supporting or leading an application support function with complex issue resolution.
• Ability to manage statutory updates, payroll cycles, and time‑critical deliverables.
• Calm, methodical, and resilient under pressure.
• Strong stakeholder communication and relationship‑building skills.
• A collaborative leader with a continuous improvement mindset.

• Smart working, giving you more flexibility such as staggered start and finish times, with up to 40% remote working where roles allow.
• 25 days paid annual leave (pro rata).
• Family‑friendly policies which include 28 weeks full pay for maternity/adoption leave and four weeks full pay for paternity/partners leave.
• Pension, share incentive plan, volunteering leave, recognition schemes and much more.