Application Support Engineer (3rd Line)

About The Role FDM is a global business and technology consultancy seeking a 3rd level Application Support Engineer to work for our client within the Finance sector. This is initially a 12 month contract with the potential to extend and will be a hybrid role that will be based in Bristol.

Our client is seeking an experienced Application Support professional to provide technical leadership across a portfolio of business-critical applications supporting global operations. This opportunity will focus on managing complex incidents, driving root cause analysis, improving application stability and performance, and collaborating with development, infrastructure and business teams to deliver high-quality support services. The successful candidate will play a key role in mentoring engineers, enhancing operational processes, and supporting the continued evolution of the organisation's application support function.

Responsibilities

Act as the technical lead for complex application, data and system incidents, ensuring timely resolution and service restoration.

Lead the triage, diagnosis and resolution of critical application issues across business-critical platforms.

Manage major incidents, providing technical leadership and stakeholder communication throughout the incident lifecycle.

Conduct root cause analysis and Problem Management activities to identify trends and implement permanent fixes.

Monitor application performance, system health and service availability, proactively identifying and resolving issues.

Perform advanced troubleshooting, debugging, log analysis and investigation of data anomalies and integration failures.

Support application releases, upgrades, deployments and maintenance activities, ensuring minimal business disruption.

Collaborate with Development, DevOps, Infrastructure and Security teams to improve application stability, performance and resilience.

Drive automation and continuous improvement initiatives to reduce manual effort and enhance operational efficiency.

Provide technical mentoring and guidance to junior support engineers, acting as an escalation point for complex issues.

Maintain and enhance technical documentation, support procedures and operational runbooks.

Support capacity planning, environment management and operational readiness for new applications and system enhancements.

Build strong relationships with business stakeholders and third-party vendors to ensure effective service delivery.

Contribute to service improvement projects, ensuring supportability and operational excellence are considered throughout the delivery lifecycle.

Ensure compliance with Incident, Problem, Change and Release Management processes.

About You

Strong experience supporting enterprise applications within a complex production environment.

Proven experience working with SWIFT messaging and payments systems.

Knowledge of COBOL development and support would be highly advantageous.

Experience with monitoring, observability, troubleshooting and log analysis tools.

Strong understanding of Incident, Problem and Change Management processes.

Minimum 5 years' experience in Application Support, Production Support, or a similar technical support role.

Experience working within Agile and DevOps environments.

Strong stakeholder management, communication and technical leadership skills.