Applications Specialist

Role Overview

This position owns the operational health and evolution of the enterprise application portfolio within an insurance environment. Day to day, you will monitor system performance, resolve incidents at first and second line, coordinate releases across environments, and partner with vendors and internal teams to keep policy administration, claims, and financial processes running without interruption. Your work directly affects business continuity, regulatory reporting, and the experience of customers who depend on reliable insurance services.

Key Responsibilities

• Deliver application support services that meet or exceed agreed service levels, including availability targets for business-critical systems.
• Act as the first and second line of defence for incidents and service requests across enterprise systems, diagnosing issues and restoring service quickly.
• Implement and maintain monitoring solutions that capture real-time performance, historical trends, and early warning signals for capacity and availability risks.
• Administer and maintain enterprise applications, ensuring they are correctly sized and configured to support business volumes, particularly during peak cycles.
• Plan and execute application upgrades, hotfixes, and code deployments through development, testing, staging, and production environments while following strict change control.
• Coordinate user acceptance, integration, and performance testing, and confirm that every release is fully ready for go-live.
• Support month-end, year-end, claims processing, policy renewal, and financial reporting by ensuring applications are stable and data is accessible when needed.
• Drive continuous improvement by analysing incidents, automating repetitive tasks, and applying ITIL disciplines such as problem, knowledge, and availability management.

Requirements & Qualifications

• Bachelor’s degree in Information Technology, Computer Science, Telecommunication Engineering, or a related field from a recognised university.
• At least four years of hands-on experience supporting and maintaining enterprise business systems in a busy, service-oriented environment.
• Relevant professional certifications and strong practical knowledge in at least two of the following: Microsoft Azure development, DevOps engineering, professional Scrum, or Transact-SQL querying.
• Solid experience with web and application servers such as Apache, IIS, Tomcat, JBoss, WebSphere, or WebLogic.
• Strong command of SQL and NoSQL databases, data modelling, data migration, data quality, and data retrieval for analytics and reporting.
• Hands-on ability to design, build, deploy, and support cloud-based applications, including experience with Azure or AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, and CI/CD pipelines.
• Proven experience implementing and supporting web services, REST APIs, middleware, microservices, and enterprise integrations.
• Working knowledge of ITIL governance frameworks and the ability to apply them to incident, problem, change, and service request management.
• Familiarity with IT security principles and security appliances as they relate to application infrastructure and access control.
• Strong interpersonal and communication skills, with the ability to explain technical issues to non-technical users and influence stakeholders across teams.