Lead Application Support Manager

We have an incredible opportunity to join us here at Phoenix Group as a Lead Application Support Manager to join our Engineering and Delivery team.  

We’re Standard Life, a retirement specialist focused entirely on retirement savings and income. We champion the belief that everyone’s journey to and through retirement can be better, and for more than 200 years, we’ve been helping our customers plan and prepare for their financial futures.

Life today is increasingly complicated, uncertain and unpredictable. People move through different careers, face unexpected moments and navigate important choices. We offer our colleagues flexibility, trust and benefits that work for whatever life brings. In return we expect curiosity, connection, accountability and high standards. We make room for what matters - so you can bring your best, every day.

We’re really proud of bringing together organisations with long and successful histories to support us in our growth journey.  We’re currently recruiting for a Lead Application Support Manager to join our Cloud Team to lead the successful operational delivery of one or more IT services to meet business and customer demands.

Supporting the day-to-day delivery of applications the L2 Application Support team are responsible for support of custom applications in Azure, AWS and on-prem platforms. Ensuring we deliver exceptional customer service consistently. To actively contribute to the operational effectiveness of the Application Support function, progressing and delivering SIP opportunities whilst adhering to best practice and always ensure process and control adherence. 

• →Ensure all applications are supported to a high standard and incidents, requests and problems are updated and resolved within a timely manner, within agreed SLA’s/OLA’s
• →Acting as a conduit between L1 desk, other application support / platform teams, core platform teams (e.g. Cloud, Integration, Salesforce) and 3rd party providers
• →Contributes ideas and effort towards the development and delivery of service improvement initiatives and related Business Application Support projects
• →Supporting 3rd Party Business applications and ensuring alignment to security policies ensuring that there is no vulnerability to the estate
• →Support live releases for all business applications, displaying a degree of flexibility to perform during agreed release windows, which may include evenings and weekends
• →Maintaining up to date in-depth technical knowledge in one or more specialist areas
• →Providing technical understanding to less experienced colleagues however without line management responsibility
• →Communicating complex technical solutions effectively to a variety of stakeholders
• →Building effective relationships with a range of stakeholders including with sourcing partners

• Deep knowledge of Cloud hyperscalers (Microsoft Azure, AWS) and ideally major SaaS solutions (Salesforce and Oracle HR & Finance)
• IT related qualification (MCP/Comp TIA/AWS/Azure)
• Website Portal experience – Rackspace, ORDS, OKTA, Postman, AWS Cloudwatch/Secrets/ECS
• Knowledge of Certification and related security standards
• Scripting skills, with technology such as Powershell
• Strong SQL and Oracle DB skills 

• Experience of ‘modern’ IT delivery and engineering practices, i.e. Platform and Product based organisations – ideally having experience of transitioning to this model from more traditional ways of working
• Installing/troubleshooting windows operating systems, deploying/packaging applications.
• Installing/troubleshooting and supporting a wide range of systems and applications.
• Previous application support or 2nd/3rd Line IT support experience essential preferably within a large multi-site environment

• Experience with automation and self-service deployment of secure & scalable solutions   
• Risk management - understanding of the delivery risks faced by IT delivery and the controls in place to manage & mitigate these risks
• Experience of key automation and other ‘enabling’ tooling, including but not limited to Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CDK), Observability (Dynatrace, Splunk) and DevSecOps toolchain (Atlassian Jira & Confluence, Github Enterprise, Artifactory)

We are committed to ensuring that everyone feels accepted and welcome applicants from all backgrounds. If your experience looks different from what we’ve advertised and you believe that you can bring value to the role, we’d love to hear from you. 

If you require any adjustments to the recruitment process, please let us know so we can help you to be at your best. 

Please note that we reserve the right to remove adverts earlier than the advertised closing date. We encourage you to apply at the earliest opportunity. 

• Guide for Candidates: thephoenixgroup.pagetiger.com/guideforcandidates #LI-GJ1
• Find or get answers from our colleagues: www.thephoenixgroup.com/careers/talk-to-us