Application Support Manager

Willis Re is expanding its global business in 2026 and developing its own applications whilst leveraging industry‑leading business applications to support business operation and growth. The Application Support Manager is a key role and is accountable for the operational support, stability, performance, availability and continual improvement of the organisation's Front Office applications. The role is responsible for the full application delivery lifecycle and acts as the primary interface between the business, technology teams and third‑party suppliers to ensure the Front Office application services remain secure, compliant and aligned to business objectives.

Key Responsibilities

• Own the operational support and service performance of the Front Office business‑critical applications. Ensure applications are stable, available, secure, performant and fit for business use.
• Maintain clear ownership of application support processes, escalation paths, service documentation, and operational procedures.
• Ensure application services are delivered in line with agreed SLAs, OLAs, KPIs, and business expectations.
• Work with business stakeholders to understand application usage, business criticality, and operational risk.
• Maintain visibility of application dependencies, including infrastructure, databases, integrations, APIs, third‑party services, and downstream systems.
• Incident and Major Incident Management: Lead resolution of application incidents, acting as the senior escalation point and coordinating teams, vendors, service desk and business users to minimise disruption.
• Ensure incidents are logged, prioritised, resolved, and communicated effectively, with timely business updates during service disruption.
• Support major incident processes, including impact assessment, stakeholder updates, post‑incident reviews and service improvement actions.
• Defect / Problem Management: Lead the analysis and remediation of recurring or high‑impact issues, ensuring root cause analysis and corrective actions are completed.
• Track known errors, workarounds, remediation plans and incident trends to reduce repeat failures and service risk.
• Work with technical teams and vendors to deliver long‑term fixes and maintain records through governance forums.
• Change, Release and Deployment Support: Ensure application changes are assessed, tested, approved and implemented through agreed change processes.
• Assess operational readiness for releases, upgrades, patches and deployments, including documentation and rollback planning.
• Represent support in change forums, coordinate release communications and support post‑implementation reviews.
• Application Monitoring and Service Performance: Provide oversight of application monitoring for availability, performance, capacity, alerts and transaction health.
• Use dashboards, service reports and operational metrics to identify risks, degradation and improvement opportunities.
• Work with technical teams to resolve performance bottlenecks and improve monitoring, logging, observability and reporting.
• Leadership and Management: Contribute to the development of the Application Support team, setting standards, processes and performance expectations.
• Manage escalations and matrix‑oriented team capability through reviews, coaching and training plans in close collaboration with managers and the leadership team.
• Build a customer‑focused, accountable support culture and promote collaboration across technology and business teams.
• Stakeholder and Business Relationship Management: Act as the primary operational contact for business stakeholders, application owners and senior management.
• Translate technical issues into clear business impact, providing regular updates on performance, risks, incidents and changes.
• Facilitate service reviews, manage expectations during disruption and use feedback to improve support services.
• Supplier and Vendor Management: Assist with managing vendors and support providers to ensure contractual service obligations, SLAs and KPIs are met.
• Provide insight in supplier reviews, escalations and performance improvement discussions, challenging poor performance where required.
• Support renewals, license reviews, commercial evaluations and ensure vendor dependencies and escalation paths are documented.
• Governance, Risk and Compliance: Ensure application support complies with IT policies, security standards, audit requirements and regulatory obligations.
• Maintain operational controls for access, change, incidents, releases, service continuity and compliance reporting.
• Manage risks, audit evidence, remediation actions, access reviews, vulnerabilities and governance escalations.
• Application Lifecycle and Documentation: Oversee the development and maintenance of accurate runbooks, knowledge articles, support models, dependency maps and escalation procedures.
• Support lifecycle planning for features, upgrades, patching, rationalisation, migration, retirement and end‑of‑support risks.
• Ensure new and changed applications are supportable, documented, monitored and operationally ready for live service.
• Service Reporting and Operational Governance: Produce service reports covering incidents, SLA performance, availability, changes, problems, risks and improvements.
• Provide clear insight, dashboards and management information to support service decisions and prioritisation.
• Support service reviews, governance forums and action tracking through to completion.
• Continuous Improvement and Automation: Identify opportunities to improve service quality, efficiency, stability, automation and user experience.
• Reduce avoidable incidents through proactive maintenance, knowledge management, tooling, training and problem resolution.
• Promote continual improvement, operational maturity, application modernisation and industry best practice.
• Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery: Ensure supported applications have appropriate continuity, recovery and operational resilience arrangements.
• Maintain recovery objectives, recovery procedures, business impact requirements and tested support readiness.
• Support disaster recovery testing, continuity planning, resilience exercises and post‑change plan reviews.

Core Skills & Experience

• Essential: Degree in IT, Computer Science or equivalent experience; ITIL Foundation Certification.
• Proven experience in Application Development, Application Support, or IT Operations roles.
• Experience leading technical support teams.
• Experience supporting business‑critical enterprise applications.
• Proven supplier and stakeholder management skills.
• Experience of supporting trading applications/high‑value applications.
• Desirable: ITIL Managing Professional, Microsoft Azure, AWS, Agile or Scrum certifications.

We combine specialist broking with analytics, modelling and research to help insurers optimise risk transfer, strengthen balance sheets and achieve sustainable growth. Our approach is relationship‑driven, transparent and outcome‑focused. At the heart of Willis Re is a focus on delivering the most cutting‑edge analytical solutions to enable more informed, better decision‑making for risk selection, portfolio optimisation and capital management.

If you’re curious, collaborative, and ambitious, you’ll find the opportunity at Willis Re to shape something extraordinary.

Equal Opportunity

We are committed to embracing a diverse, inclusive and flexible work environment. We provide equal opportunity to all qualified individuals regardless of race, colour, religion, age, gender, gender expression, national origin, veteran status, disability, orientation or any other legally protected categories.

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