Head of Application Support

We are seeking an experienced Head of Application Support for a top company based in Kildare to lead and develop an enterprise application support function, ensuring the stability, availability and performance of critical business applications.

This is a senior leadership position with responsibility for application support strategy, service delivery, team leadership, operational performance and continuous improvement. 3 days a week onsite and 2 days from home

Key Responsibilities

• Lead and manage the Application Support function, including internal teams and third-party service providers.
• Take ownership of the operational support and availability of business-critical applications.
• Develop and implement the application support strategy, operating model and service standards.
• Manage incident, problem, change and release management processes across the application estate.
• Ensure critical incidents are managed effectively, including escalation, stakeholder communication and root-cause analysis.
• Establish and monitor SLAs, KPIs and operational performance metrics.
• Drive improvements in application availability, resilience, monitoring and support processes.
• Work closely with software development, infrastructure, cloud, architecture and security teams.
• Build strong relationships with business stakeholders and ensure technology issues are prioritised according to business impact.
• Manage relationships and performance across application vendors and outsourced technology partners.
• Oversee application upgrades, releases, patches and production changes.
• Identify opportunities for automation and improved monitoring to reduce manual support activity and recurring incidents.
• Ensure appropriate documentation, knowledge management and support procedures are maintained.
• Support disaster recovery, business continuity and operational resilience initiatives.
• Manage team capacity, recruitment, development and succession planning.
• Contribute to technology strategy, budgeting and application roadmap decisions.

Experience & Skills

• Significant experience within Application Support, Production Support or IT Service Management, including experience at leadership level.
• Proven experience managing teams supporting complex, business-critical applications.
• Strong knowledge of ITIL/service management principles, particularly incident, problem, change and release management.
• Experience operating within enterprise technology environments with demanding availability and service requirements.
• Strong understanding of application architecture, integrations, APIs, databases and infrastructure/cloud environments.
• Experience managing major production incidents and coordinating technical teams through resolution.
• Strong vendor and third-party management experience.
• Experience defining and reporting against SLAs, KPIs and service performance metrics.
• Understanding of application monitoring, observability and automation tools.
• Excellent stakeholder management skills with the ability to communicate effectively with both technical teams and senior business leaders.
• Strong people-management skills with a track record of developing high-performing technical teams.

Desirable

• ITIL certification or equivalent service-management qualification.
• Experience with cloud platforms such as Azure or AWS.
• Knowledge of SQL and relational database environments.
• Experience with ServiceNow or similar ITSM platforms.
• Experience supporting ERP, CRM, financial, customer-facing or other enterprise applications.
• Previous involvement in application modernisation or cloud-transformation programmes.

For more info you can contact [email protected]