Application Support Engineer

Overview: Job Title: Application Support Engineer Location: Must be commutable at least twice a week, more if/when required, to one of the following sites: Whitstable, Tunbridge Wells Salary: To £50k depending on experience Hours: 35 hour working week. Monday to Friday, Full-Time, Permanent.
Application Support Engineer Join our dynamic business as an Application Support Engineer An Application Support Engineer is required to join a dynamic and growing team to enhance, support and maintain the “Markerstudy Hosted Rating” (MHR) system. The MHR is a highly acclaimed and business critical Cloud based platform (multi-Cloud). Become part of a growing team, focussed solely on supporting a key application for the fastest growing insurance group in the UK. Your purpose is to support the running and continual improvement of our award-winning pricing and rating solution (processing millions of requests every day of the year). Be a key part in supporting the evolution of our multi-cloud technology, ensuring that we maintain first class support for a business-critical capability containing modern tech such as Machine Learning, AI, high resilience and scaled operations.
About us We are a leading and expanding insurance group who are renowned for their staff reward and recognition and are ranked highly in The Times Top 30 Big Companies to work for. We are a modern and progressive group and pride ourselves on our innovative IT software and dynamic and agile way of working. In 2020, the group became the 5th largest motor insurance provider after completing the purchase of the Co-op Insurance underwriting business. We continue to grow and are one of the largest and fastest growing insurance groups in the UK in 2022. The group’s portfolio includes many household brands including; Brightside Insurance (acquired April 2021), Insurance Factory, one of the UK’s largest affinity based insurance intermediaries for pet insurance, Auto Windscreens, VisionTrack, Vision Vehicle Solutions and a number of other brands such as Geoffrey Insurance and Zenith Insurance.
Overview We are looking for enthusiastic, proactive candidates with an attention to detail, an ability to analyse and a capacity to learn quickly, in an area that is constantly evolving and improving. You will also need to be able to manage workloads effectively and to be flexible to support the business as required. You should have experience of implementing, maintaining and supporting applications based in the Cloud, such as Microsoft Azure, and understanding of containerisation, using Kubernetes or similar. Responsibilities: Responsibilities To be an integral part of the constant ongoing cutting-edge changes, supporting the evolution of the award-winning platform and delivering continual improvement in the support processes, your responsibilities will include (but not necessarily be limited to) the following:

• Ensure first class support, meeting the expected SLA’s for a critical business capability
• Implement Service Fabric (SF) & Kubernetes (K8s) Infrastructure & applications
• Upgrade SF, Azure, Radar Live (RLX), K8s, AppDynamics, etc, as required to keep current
• Certificate rotations / updates
• CI/CD process maintenance (Pipelines, etc)
• Management of Azure / K8s / RLX components (Default settings, maintenance, updates, etc)
• Regular monitoring of the MHR services / platform
• Creation and management of Dashboards & Alerts
• Proactive identification and investigation of unexpected changes in MHR performance / behaviour
• Problem resolution for live and test service-related issues
• Release implementation (out of hours where required)
• Out of hours (second line) support (and occasional deployment when required) for the MHR
• 24 hr availability for incidents / support (shared with other team members)
• Regular environment review (housekeeping, cost management, performance, etc)
• Development, maintenance and evolution of support standards & documentation
• Business comms where necessary (Issues, Releases, maintenance, investigations)
• Control access to Cloud and in-house applications
• Support customers, providing necessary training and advice
• Take ownership of Security related incidents, taking all appropriate remedial actions

Qualifications: Required / Desired skills

• Azure (Service Fabric, VMs, APIM, App Insights, PowerShell, etc)
• Containerisation – Kubernetes, Docker
• SQL and/or similar query languages
• Understanding of CI-CD tools
• Previous experience in a second line role
• Knowledge of monitoring tools (such as App Insights, App Dynamics, Grafana)
• ITIL training
• Ability to identify opportunities from faults / issues
• Attention to detail and an ability to analyse
• Ability to learn quickly
• Proactivity and positive attitude
• Good communication skills, both written and verbal, across all levels