Application Support Team Lead

IT SQL Application Support Team Lead - Either Edinburgh or Glasgow Based. Hybrid working 2/3 days a week in the office.

The role is responsible for supporting SQL application infrastructure and managing incidents across the technical estate. The team creates databases, SQL reports, and SSIS packages whilst providing day-to-day support to business and internal technical teams, and in some cases dealing directly with client FIs and their tech teams. The role will manage incidents and see tickets through to resolution, working with escalation processes and key stakeholders. Once a new ITSM system is implemented, the team will manage incidents and tickets through that system rather than dealing directly with clients.

Role Responsibilities

• Managing incidents in the morning, conducting checks to ensure the estate is up and running, communicating outages to relevant parties, working with teams to resolve issues, managing team throughput on a day-to-day basis, checking boards to ensure work is picked up and managed appropriately, dealing with escalations before they reach senior management, and working with internal stakeholders.
• The role involves managing a team of 2 individuals and ensuring their work is prioritised and completed once tickets are filtered through from the new service desk after initial triage.

Scope of work

• Supporting SQL queries and packages built by the data engineering team, debugging and fixing issues in live environments, investigating client reports of missing or incorrect data to determine whether issues are system-related or caused by upstream data problems.
• Identifying and resolving performance issues with overnight batch jobs that run longer than expected and cause dependent jobs to fail or run without complete information.
• Working with the DBA team on process of elimination to narrow down whether problems originate from database, infrastructure, or other system components.

Team Overview

• Team size: 3 including this role.
• Team structure: The team sits within the IT support function and works closely with the DBA team, data engineering team, and infrastructure teams. The team is organisationally closer to the DBA team and engages with developers primarily on a point of escalation.
• Team goals: The team manages the SQL application support estate and ensures systems are running smoothly. They work to resolve incidents and performance issues, support the data engineering team's queries and packages in live environments, collaborate with DBAs and infrastructure teams to maintain system health and performance, and handle critical time-sensitive issues in the regulated financial services environment.

Working with a diverse technical estate including Microsoft SQL Server, Oracle, and middleware systems on Linux boxes. Exposure to financial services regulatory environment and critical time-sensitive issues that require quick resolution. Collaboration with multiple technical teams including data engineers, DBAs, and infrastructure teams, providing breadth of technical exposure. Hands-on technical work combined with team leadership responsibilities, allowing for both technical and management development. Potential to improve team independence and reduce reliance on the development team for issue resolution.

Ideal Candidate

• SQL proficiency in Oracle or Microsoft SQL Server (or both).
• SSIS package understanding and interpretation, including ability to dig through packages and understand what is happening.
• Team lead experience, particularly important for external candidates.
• Financial services experience, given the regulatory setup and critical time-pressed issues.
• Ability to write and interpret SQL code proficiently.
• Reasonable amount of technical hands-on experience.
• Linux or Unix scripting background - nice to have.
• API understanding and logging interrogation skills - nice to have.
• Comfort with digging through code and understanding technical details without necessarily being able to write code fully.