Operations Engineer (Senior) (Production Application Support & Troubleshooting + Monitoring & Operational Stability + IT Service Management & Stakeholder Support)

Introduction

We are looking for an experienced Operations Engineer (Senior) to join a dynamic technology environment supporting critical enterprise applications and high-availability production systems.

The successful candidate will take ownership of application operations, production support, incident resolution, monitoring and technical troubleshooting across complex enterprise platforms. This is a senior-level role requiring strong independent problem-solving capabilities, excellent communication and the ability to collaborate effectively across application, infrastructure, development and business teams.

You will play a key role in ensuring application stability, service availability and operational excellence while continuously identifying opportunities to reduce incidents and improve support processes

Key Responsibilities

• Monitor application health and performance using Grafana and Loki.

• Investigate, troubleshoot and resolve production incidents.

• Perform application log analysis, exception handling and transaction tracing.

• Analyse JVM behaviour and application performance.

• Support business users, dealers and other stakeholders with application-related issues.

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

• Investigate REST API and web service issues.

• Analyse and validate JSON payloads and integration transactions.

• Perform initial Root Cause Analysis (RCA) and document technical findings.

• Support incident, problem and change management processes.

• Participate in major incident and escalation management.

• Support releases, deployments and production changes.

• Perform SQL queries and database validation during incident investigations.

• Monitor service health, SLAs and application performance.

• Coordinate with Level 3 development and infrastructure teams where required.

• Perform code debugging, code fixes and detailed root-cause analysis for application issues.

• Contribute to operational excellence initiatives aimed at reducing recurring incidents.

• Ensure effective communication with technical and business stakeholders.

Essential skills

IT Service Management

• Incident, Problem and Change Management

• Major Incident and Escalation Management

• Strong understanding of ITIL principles

• Service ownership and production support

Application Support & Troubleshooting

• Java enterprise application support

• JVM monitoring and analysis

• Application log analysis

• Exception handling and stack trace interpretation

• Production issue investigation and resolution

• Root Cause Analysis (RCA)

APIs & Integration

• REST API troubleshooting

• JSON payload analysis and validation

• Web services support and diagnostics

• Integration monitoring and troubleshooting

• Message processing, reconciliation and retry management

Infrastructure & Platform Support

• SQL querying and database validation

• Networking fundamentals, including:

• DNS

• HTTPS

• Firewalls

• Load Balancers

• Authentication technologies such as:

• SSO

• LDAP

• Active Directory

Monitoring & Observability

• Grafana dashboard monitoring

• Loki log querying

• Service health monitoring

• SLA tracking and performance analysis

• Transaction tracing

Behavioural Competencies

• Analytical troubleshooting

• Customer support orientation

• Structured communication

• Strong service ownership

• Cross-functional collaboration

• Ability to influence and gain stakeholder buy-in

• Ability to work independently and take ownership of complex issues

Advantageous Skills

• Vehicle sales processes

• Pricing and offer workflows

• Contract generation

• Finance and leasing environments

• Dealership operations

• Financial services systems support

• Dealer Management Systems (DMS)

• Enterprise SaaS environments

• High-availability production environments

• HTML, CSS and JavaScript

• Java application architecture

• CI/CD pipelines

• Advanced SQL analysis

• Middleware administration

• API Gateway support

• Azure, AWS or GCP

• Kubernetes

• Automation and scripting

• ITIL Foundation certification

• KPI reporting

• Risk and audit awareness

Minimum Qualifications and Experience

• IT Degree, Diploma or equivalent relevant working experience.

• 8–10+ years of application support experience in enterprise environments.

• Strong experience supporting Java applications and production systems.

• Experience with enterprise integrations and APIs.

• Experience working with SQL databases.

• Experience with monitoring and observability platforms, particularly Grafana and Loki.

• Strong experience in production incident investigation and resolution.

• Experience working in complex, high-availability environments.

• Automotive, dealer management or financial services experience will be advantageous.

• ITIL Foundation or another relevant certification is advantageous.