Application Support SME - SRE Leader

At Ascendion, we are committed to delivering highly reliable, scalable, and intelligent application-managed services for our customers. We are seeking a Application Support SME - SRE Leader , who will function as both a Subject Matter Expert (SME) and a Techno-Managerial leader .

This role requires someone who brings a blend of deep technical expertise and strong leadership instincts capable of understanding complex application architectures while driving operational excellence across teams, customers, and delivery functions. The ideal candidate has hands-on knowledge of microservices, application lifecycle management , logging, tracing, observability, telemetry, and has led large, complex 24x7 operations .

You will act as the strategic and technical authority for your domain, collaborating with customers, engineering teams, SRE/DevOps groups, and Delivery Leaders to design, implement, and mature reliable application operations.

Personal Leadership

The successful candidate:

• Demonstrates strong techno-managerial leadership, balancing engineering depth with delivery oversight
• Acts as the SME for application operations, observability, SRE practices, and resilience engineering
• Influences cross-functional teams and drives alignment in matrixed environments
• Effectively communicates with executives, architects, engineers, and customer stakeholders
• Shows a strong commitment to quality, operational excellence, and customer success

Key Responsibilities

Techno-Managerial Leadership & SME Responsibilities

• Serve as the primary SME for application-managed services, microservices operations, observability, and reliability engineering.
• Guide teams on best practices for logging, distributed tracing, metrics, alerting, and telemetry implementation .
• Provide technical direction during critical incidents, major outages, and complex problem investigations.
• Mentor engineering teams and uplift their capabilities in application operations, SRE, automation, and monitoring strategies.
• Drive design reviews, operational readiness assessments, and reliability improvements across applications.

Service Delivery & Operational Excellence

• Own 24x7 service delivery for application operations, ensuring reliability, scalability, and performance.
• Lead the establishment and enforcement of SLOs, SLAs, error budgets, runbooks, and operational frameworks.
• Ensure systems, methodologies, and monitoring strategies are mature, automated, and scalable.
• Oversee incident response, problem management, and root-cause analysis with a focus on continuous improvement.

Customer, Stakeholder, and Cross-Functional Leadership

• Act as a trusted advisor to customer leadership, guiding them on application health, modernization, and operational maturity.
• Address escalations, communicate status updates, and set clear expectations for service delivery.
• Build strong relationships across engineering, DevOps, architecture, and business teams.
• Provide SME-level insight during pre-sales discussions, solution design, and proposal reviews.

Project, Change & Lifecycle Management

• Oversee application lifecycle governance including deploy, operate, measure, and enhance phases.
• Ensure changes to application environments are controlled, tested, and aligned to reliability standards.
• Maintain comprehensive documentation, governance artifacts, and operational deliverables.

Performance & Quality Management

• Define and monitor critical operational metrics (SLA, SLO, MTTR, MTTD, throughput, capacity).
• Drive continuous improvement initiatives including automation, shift-left, cost optimization, and self-healing capabilities.
• Produce accurate and actionable reporting for leadership and customers.
• Lead performance management, recruitment, mentoring, and training of operational teams.

Technical Skill Requirements

• Deep knowledge of microservices, APIs, cloud-native architectures , and containerized environments.
• Proven experience running large-scale, highly available, complex application ecosystems in 24x7 environments.
• Strong grounding in DevOps and SRE principles : CI/CD, automation, resiliency patterns, deployment strategies.
• Strong hands-on understanding of application observability :
• Distributed tracing
• Centralized logging systems
• Metrics instrumentation
• Telemetry correlation
• APM platforms (Datadog, Dynatrace, New Relic, AppDynamics, etc.)
• Experience with cloud platforms (Azure, AWS, GCP) and hybrid architectures.
• Strong ITIL process proficiency (Incident, Problem, Change).
• Familiarity with infrastructure components supporting apps (networking, compute, databases, messaging, caching).

Preferred Qualifications

• ITIL certification
• Good understanding of the SDLC lifecycle, application architecture, and microservice
• SRE, DevOps, or cloud certification (Azure/AWS/GCP)
• Experience operating or supporting production microservices at scale
• Exposure to chaos engineering, resiliency testing, and reliability automation
• Prior experience handling large enterprise customers and multi-vendor delivery models
• Must be proficient and certified in ITIL and have excellent practical ITSM knowledge.
• Ability to advise on the enhancement/evaluation of changes in the customer production environment.