B3 Senior Application Operations Engineer in Social Security Scotland in Glasgow

Social Security Scotland is looking for a Senior Application Operations Engineer to join our Digital Services Branch. In this role, you will support and improve a portfolio of enterprise applications that are critical to the delivery of benefits and services to the people of Scotland.

Working within a complex enterprise environment, you will be responsible for the day-to-day operation of business-critical applications, acting as a technical subject matter expert for assigned services. You will lead incident and problem resolution activities, coordinating support teams, technology specialists and suppliers to ensure issues are investigated and resolved within agreed service levels. Through effective troubleshooting and root cause analysis, you will help ensure systems remain secure, reliable and resilient.

You will develop a detailed understanding of the applications you support, their underlying technology stacks and their dependencies across the wider digital estate. Using this knowledge, you will investigate complex technical issues, identify factors affecting application availability and performance, and support the delivery of effective solutions.

As well as supporting live services, you will proactively review application performance and capacity to ensure services continue to meet business needs. You will identify opportunities to improve reliability, availability, security and operational efficiency, working with colleagues and suppliers to deliver improvements and maintain application roadmaps. You will also contribute to the assessment of application changes and support the introduction of new or enhanced services into live operation.

The role includes working closely with architects, engineers, suppliers, business owners and end users to resolve issues, improve service performance and ensure applications continue to meet organisational standards. You will support application patching, certification and compliance activities, working with Information Security colleagues and suppliers to ensure services remain aligned with technology, security and governance requirements.

This is an opportunity to work across a diverse and evolving application landscape, helping to deliver trusted and effective digital services that support the people of Scotland.

An application operations engineer supports, manages and maintains a single application or a suite of applications. Dealing with more complex issues, a Senior Application Operations Engineer is responsible for co-ordinating change-based activities, such as taking services live. Depending on the complexity and size of a project and the likely impact it will have on the business, you might manage and maintain certain aspects of an application.

• Manage application services and components to ensure they meet business requirements, service levels and performance targets.
• Assess, document and implement change requests, evaluating impacts and ensuring effective change management.
• Identify opportunities to improve processes, contributing to the design and delivery of optimisation initiatives.
• Diagnose, prioritise and resolve incidents, taking ownership through to resolution, mitigation or handover.
• Investigate recurring issues, monitor trends and implement preventative measures to reduce future incidents.
• Collaborate with technical specialists and stakeholders to determine and implement appropriate solutions.
• Translate technical and business requirements into practical, scalable frameworks and solutions.
• Utilise management systems (such as JIRA), monitoring tools (such as Kibana) and logical data models to investigate issues, analyse performance and produce reports.
• Install, configure, maintain and reconfigure application platforms and related technologies.
• Monitor, optimise and forecast application performance, capacity and resource requirements.
• Understand core technical concepts related to this role and apply them with guidance.
• Review requirements and specifications, define test conditions, identify risks, and analyse and report testing outcomes.
• Engage users and stakeholders to gather requirements, conduct user-focused research, and use qualitative and quantitative insights to deliver user-centred outcomes.

Demonstrable experience of configuring, supporting and maintaining applications and platforms within a complex enterprise environment, including conducting complex incident and root cause investigations and taking ownership of incidents through to resolution. Demonstrable knowledge of recognised IT standards and best practices, including practical experience of ITIL and project delivery methodologies (such as Agile or PRINCE2) to support service improvement, change delivery and customer requirements.

Changing and Improving - Level 3 Leadership - Level 3

Apply online, you must provide a CV and a Supporting Statement (of no more than 750 words) which provides evidence of how you meet the Experience and Behaviours outlined in the Success Profiles above. Both the CV and the Supporting Statement provided will be assessed against the criteria for the role.

If you have specific questions about the role you are applying for, please contact us.

Social Security Scotland are committed to equality and inclusion, and we aim to recruit a diverse workforce that reflects the population of our nation. Social Security Scotland are a Disability Confident Employer. We will consider and implement any reasonable adjustments you may require throughout the recruitment process and during the course of your employment, should you be successful in securing a post.