Operations Engineer (Advanced)- Java Enterprise Application Support, Production Operations

Introduction

We are hiring an Operations Engineer (Advanced) to provide advanced application support and production operations for a critical enterprise Retail Sales Services platform. The role focuses on ensuring application stability, resolving production incidents, monitoring system health, troubleshooting integrations, and supporting continuous operational improvement in a high-availability environment.

ESSENTIAL SKILLS

1. Behavioral Competencies

• Analytical troubleshooting

• Customer support

• Structured communication

• Service ownership

• Cross-functional collaboration

2. IT Service Management

• Incident, Problem and Change Management

• Major Incident and Escalation Management

• ITIL principles

3. Application Support & Troubleshooting

• Java enterprise application support

• JVM monitoring and analysis

• Application log analysis, exception handling and stack trace interpretation

• Incident investigation and production issue resolution

• Root Cause Analysis (RCA)

4. APIs & Integration Support

• REST API troubleshooting

• JSON payload analysis and validation

• Web services support and diagnostics

• Integration monitoring and troubleshooting

• Message processing, reconciliation and retry management

5. Infrastructure & Platform Support

• SQL querying and database validation

• Networking fundamentals (DNS, HTTPS, Firewalls, Load Balancers)

• Authentication technologies (SSO, LDAP, Active Directory)

6. Monitoring & Observability

• Grafana dashboard monitoring

• Loki log querying

• Service health monitoring

• SLA tracking and performance analysis

• Transaction tracing

ADVANTAGEOUS SKILLS

7. Automotive & Business Knowledge

• Vehicle sales processes

• Pricing and offer workflows

• Contract generation

• Finance and leasing awareness

• Dealership operations

8. Industry Experience

• Financial services systems support

• Dealer Management Systems (DMS)

• Enterprise SaaS support

• High-availability production environments

9. Development (Coding) & Technical Understanding

• HTML, CSS and JavaScript

• Java application architecture

• CI/CD pipelines

10. Advanced Support Capabilities

• Advanced SQL analysis

• Middleware administration

• API Gateway support

• Cloud platforms (Azure, AWS, GCP)

• Kubernetes awareness

• Automation and scripting

11. Governance & Quality

• ITIL Foundation Certification

• KPI reporting

• Risk and audit awareness

Duties & Responsibilities

• Monitor application health using Grafana and Loki.

• Investigate and resolve production incidents.

• Perform log analysis and transaction tracing.

• Support dealer and business user issues.

• Troubleshoot front-end, back-end and integration failures.

• Perform initial root cause analysis and document findings.

• Support releases, deployments and production changes.

• Support operational excellence goals by applying strong operations knowledge to reduce incidents.

• Coordinate with Level 3 for development and infrastructure activities.

• 3rd Level: Perform code debugging, code fixes and root-cause analysis for application issues.

Desired Experience & Qualification

• IT Degree or Diploma / equivalent working experience.

• 5 to 8+ years application support experience in enterprise environments.

• Experience supporting Java applications, production systems, integration, SQL databases and monitoring platforms such as Grafana and Loki.

• Automotive, dealer management or financial services experience is advantageous.

• ITIL Foundation / other relevant certification advantageous

Interested?

Interested candidates should send their CVs to recruitment@abalobisolutions.co.za