IT Application Engineer – Practice Applications in Birmingham

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The IT Practice Applications team operates within the Global IT Application and Engineering Services and supports a diverse portfolio of firm-critical applications. The team is globally distributed, providing engineering and operational support across multiple offices, and works closely with stakeholders, project teams, and vendors to deliver reliable, secure, and well-governed application services.

Working Hours: 35 hours per week, 9:30am to 5:30pm but additional hours may be required. We are happy to consider agile and flexible working patterns. Our approach to hybrid working allows for up to 40% of time working from home and 60% working in the office.

Role Overview

The IT Application Engineer – Practice Applications is a hands-on technical role responsible for the support, maintenance, configuration, and continuous improvement of applications within the Practice Applications portfolio. The postholder acts as technical owner for assigned applications, providing a clear point of accountability for operational stability, lifecycle management, and service improvement. These applications range from in-house developed to commercial off-the-shelf applications. The role is responsible for integrations, data handling, reporting, implementation, testing and ongoing support.

The IT Application Engineer – Practice Applications will work closely with the Principal IT Application Engineer – Practice Applications, Senior Engineers, service management, InfoSec, Infrastructure teams, IT Project Managers, Business Analysts, and global stakeholders, and business users to deliver stable, supportable, and scalable application services across the firm.

Key Responsibilities

• Provide technical support across Practice Applications, resolving incidents, requests, and tasks through the firm’s service management platform.
• Perform root cause analysis for recurring and complex incidents, implementing permanent remediation.
• Maintain and enhance application configurations, integrations, and platform dependencies, including reporting and upgrade activities.
• Configure and administer vendor-hosted SaaS applications in line with firm standards and operational requirements.
• Support application upgrades, patching, and lifecycle management activities.
• Assist with onboarding of new applications into support, ensuring operational readiness.
• Act as technical owner for assigned applications, including operational health, lifecycle management, and continuous improvement.
• Provide application production support, including participation in major incident response and out-of-hours support where required.
• Plan, coordinate, and implement application changes in accordance with change management processes.
• Support software deployments and installs across EUC and server-side components, including defect remediation and promotion of changes across DEV, TEST, UAT, and PROD environments.

Operational Stability and Service Improvement

• Reduce repeat incidents through proactive engineering improvements.
• Identify technical debt and contribute to remediation plans.
• Implement monitoring, alerting, and health checks where gaps exist.
• Improve service resilience through documentation, automation, and standardisation.
• Contribute to engineering backlog prioritisation.
• Monitor applications and recommend reliability, performance, and maintainability improvements.
• Contribute to application consolidation and rationalisation initiatives to improve agility, reduce cost, and enhance user experience.

Documentation and Knowledge Management

• Maintain technical documentation including CMDB records, runbooks, knowledge articles, support procedures, and design documentation.
• Capture troubleshooting knowledge and support knowledge transfer from vendors and project teams.
• Document application architecture, integrations, and support models to support long-term maintainability.

Security, Risk and Compliance

• Ensure applications meet security, patching, and lifecycle standards.
• Support identity integration, SSO configuration, and access controls.
• Assist with audit responses and remediation of security findings.
• Work with InfoSec to address vulnerabilities and compliance requirements.
• Comply with IT change management standards and participate in change planning and implementation activities.

Vendor and Stakeholder Collaboration

• Work with vendors to troubleshoot issues, manage changes, and maintain knowledge of supported platforms.
• Participate in technical discussions with firm stakeholders.
• Provide clear technical status and risk updates to stakeholders.
• Support service transition and change implementation activities.
• Monitor vendor release notes, product roadmaps, and planned changes for supported applications.
• Collaborate with project managers, business analysts, QA analysts, database administrators, infrastructure teams, and business users.

Team Contribution

• Contribute to continuous improvement initiatives across Practice Applications and other IT Functions.
• Share knowledge and support capability uplift across the team.
• Contribute to consistent engineering standards and ways of working across the team.

Skills & Experience

Essential Experience

• Strong experience supporting enterprise applications in complex environments.
• Hands-on troubleshooting across multi-tier enterprise applications, including infrastructure, application, and integration layers.
• Experience supporting SaaS, vendor-hosted, and on-premise applications within enterprise environments.
• Good understanding of incident, problem, and change management processes.
• Experience producing and maintaining technical documentation, designs, and runbooks.
• Strong analytical and problem-solving skills.
• Ability to work independently with clear ownership of services.
• Strong communication skills, including the ability to translate technical concepts for non-technical stakeholders and end users.
• Ability to manage workload and prioritise tasks across multiple applications and initiatives.
• Ability to recognise technical boundaries and escalate appropriately.
• Understanding of DEV / TEST / UAT / PROD environment management.

Essential Core Technical Capability

• Experience working with Windows Server, Microsoft 365, and identity platforms.
• Working knowledge of Entra ID and identity and access management concepts.
• Understanding of Microsoft Power Platform capabilities (e.g., Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI).
• Understanding of application lifecycle management principles.
• Experience supporting application integrations and data flows.
• Understanding of Windows Server operational maintenance.
• Experience using engineering and work management tools for analysis, documentation, and process design.

Additional Technical Experience (Beneficial)

• Experience supporting legal or professional services applications in regulated, security-conscious enterprise environments.
• Experience supporting legal CRM platforms such as InterAction or similar relationship management systems.
• Experience supporting software such as Anaqua or similar docketing management systems.
• Experience supporting SharePoint Online hosted extranets and related application integrations.
• Understanding of application packaging and deployment concepts.
• Experience supporting SQL-based applications, including basic to intermediate T-SQL querying using SQL Server Management Studio.
• Understanding of PowerShell scripting.
• Understanding of networking and firewall awareness for application troubleshooting.
• Knowledge of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, XML, XSLT, or XAML.

Qualifications & Training

• Experience in an Application Support Engineer or Application Engineer role supporting business-critical enterprise applications.
• Strong working knowledge of Microsoft 365, Windows Server, and identity platforms.
• ITIL Foundation or equivalent service management experience desirable.
• Hold, or be willing to work towards attaining, relevant Microsoft certifications (e.g., AZ-900: Microsoft Azure Fundamentals, PL-900: Microsoft Power Platform Fundamentals).

Equal Opportunities Employment & Agile Working Statement

It is the policy of Hogan Lovells to provide equal opportunities for all employees in relation to recruitment, training and promotion. Decisions in these areas will be made only by reference to the requirements of the job and shall not be influenced by any consideration of racial or ethnic origin, religion, sex, gender and gender identity, age, sexual orientation, marital and civil partnership status, pregnancy or disability. Our goal is to embed flexibility across our business by giving everyone the opportunity to work in an agile way, whether as a regular pattern or on an ad hoc basis, and we will be happy to discuss this further.