About the Team

We are building several high-performing engineering teams, who will have full Product ownership from design to deployment.  We will be adopting a quality-first approach to building solutions which will directly improve our customer experience and ensure that we can provide first-rate support to internal partners and external customers.  Our Agile teams will take responsibility for supporting high-quality products and will provide a reactive and responsive support model for incidents including an on-call function. This support model we plan to adopt are core hours covering UK 9am to 5pm, with a rotational on-call requirement.

The team will also adopt a “Prevention is better than the Cure” approach driving a proactive, investigative strategy to put in place measures that will improve the Production environment and prevent future issues across applications.

The intention is for our teams to continually adapt and reinvent their skills and capabilities over time as technologies change and evolve. We will provide the right challenges and opportunities to enable your success, however we need you to bring your enthusiasm, the ability to learn quickly, and to take minimum-viable-product technology and help build industrialised solutions for the enterprise. Once our teams have successfully delivered robust and scalable solutions for Aflac, there will be a new technology waiting to be explored and built to scale within our organisation. We’ll be keeping things pretty fresh.

About the Role

We want Application Support Engineers who are passionate about high quality outcomes for the customer and can put the end-user at the centre of their thinking. Incredible communication skills and people who can think technically but translate technical scenarios into easily understood language is vital. Having a mindset that possesses a product-driven approach to outcomes, and knows how to deliver outstanding Product Support, is essential to the success of the team.

Experience in working in a cross-functional team or Application Support team that can quickly respond to high-severity incidents, solve critical production issues, and work across multiple product teams and technologies is critical. Fostering relationships with partner teams, both in Northern Ireland and the US, is going to be a major part of the role, hence teamworking and collaboration is key.  Finally, there are a wide range of technologies and applications to support that are at various stages of build and delivery, hence this is a fantastic opportunity for junior or senior experienced engineers alike.

What you'll be doing:

• Provide Level 2 & Level 3 support, including triage, investigation and resolution capabilities for multiple products
• Operate in a core-hour support model than runs from 9am – 5pm UK time
• Conform to an on-call support model for out-of-hours and weekend support
• Provide effective problem management activities across all of Aflac NI’s Product teams
• Contribute to the planning of application/infrastructure releases and configuration changes
• Examine potential areas for service improvement and raise proposals with our US counterparts and internal Aflac NI leadership
• Interact with internal teams and external 3rd party vendors to trouble shoot and resolve complex application problems 
• Contribute to the design and delivery of appropriate metrics for reporting on key performance and quality indicators
• Maintain application monitoring, performance tuning and testing 
• Contribute to continual review and improvement of policies and procedures within the application support function remit 

What you need to have 

Below is an overview of the skills and experience we are looking for, but remember, don’t rule yourself out if you don’t have everything on the list – it’s your intellect and your attitude that we’re really after! 

Essential

• Previous experience operating in application support teams, operating on both distributed and mainframe platforms
• Extensive problem solving and debugging skills 
• Excellent interpersonal and communication skills, including the ability to engage with stakeholders both locally and in US
• Ability to independently apply production upgrades and support the products and technologies 
• Experienced in Problem and Incident Management 
• Experience with supporting multi-tier infrastructures and applications across distributed systems
• Experience with supporting customer facing applications and an understanding of web and API technology 
• Customer-focused: demonstrating a clear understanding of customer needs and priorities in relation to product functionality and high-quality outcomes
• Bachelor’s degree, preferably in a Computer Science, Engineering, or STEM subject. Comparable commercial experience may also be considered

Desirable

• Experience with Pega Rules Process Commander
• Experience with Mobile applications, web applications and distributed technology
• Knowledge of Cloud platforms and experience of working across omni-cloud environments.
• Knowledge and experience of DevOps as part of Agile software engineering
• Experience of supporting Agile solutions for customers/clients located in different time zones

So that’s us. Thanks for taking the time to read this far (pretty impressive in the era of the 280-character tweet). We look forward to hearing from you if you fancy joining a tech innovation company with the agility of a start-up and the stability of a Fortune 500 U.S. company. 

Aflac Northern Ireland is an equal opportunities employer