Application Production Support Lead / SRE Lead :: Vienna, VA(Onsite)

Application Production Support Lead / SRE Lead

Job Location: Vienna, VA

Job Summary

We are seeking an experienced Application Production Support SRE Lead to lead application production support operations and drive the transformation from a traditional, incident-driven support model to a proactive Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) approach.

The ideal candidate will have extensive experience in application production support, strong knowledge of SRE principles, and a proven ability to reduce application outages, improve service reliability, and implement proactive monitoring and incident prevention strategies.

This role will focus specifically on application reliability and production support, rather than infrastructure engineering.

The successful candidate will lead a team of approximately eight professionals, develop a roadmap for SRE adoption, and implement processes and practices that identify and resolve potential application issues before they affect business operations.

The candidate should be comfortable working with application performance metrics, monitoring tools, database response times, incident trends, and root cause analysis to improve application stability and operational efficiency.

Experience with Microsoft Azure and financial services environments will be an advantage.

Key Responsibilities

·       Lead application production support operations for business-critical applications.

·       Drive the transformation from traditional reactive production support to proactive SRE practices.

·       Develop and implement an SRE adoption roadmap.

·       Lead and coordinate a team of approximately eight production support professionals.

·       Establish proactive application monitoring and alerting mechanisms.

·       Identify application reliability risks and implement preventive measures.

·       Reduce recurring incidents, application outages, and service disruptions.

·       Monitor application performance, availability, response times, and operational health.

·       Analyze database response times and application performance degradation.

·       Lead incident management, problem management, and root cause analysis (RCA).

·       Develop preventive action plans to eliminate recurring production issues.

·       Define and track operational KPIs and reliability metrics.

·       Improve Mean Time to Detect (MTTD) and Mean Time to Recover (MTTR).

·       Work closely with development, database, infrastructure, and business teams.

·       Balance daily production support activities with long-term SRE transformation initiatives.

·       Communicate application health, production risks, and improvement initiatives to stakeholders.

Required Qualifications

1.     Minimum 7+ years of experience in application production support, including extensive experience supporting business-critical production applications.

2.     Minimum 3 years of experience in Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) or implementing SRE practices within application support environments.

3.     Demonstrated experience leading or contributing to the transformation of traditional production support operations into a proactive, reliability-focused operating model.

4.     Experience developing roadmaps, defining improvement initiatives, and implementing proactive application support strategies.

5.     Strong knowledge of application monitoring, alerting, performance management, and production troubleshooting.

6.     Hands-on experience investigating application failures, performance degradation, database response delays, and recurring production incidents.

7.     Strong understanding of incident management, problem management, root cause analysis, and preventive action planning.

8.     Experience identifying application reliability risks and implementing measures to reduce outages and recurring incidents.

9.     Experience using operational metrics to assess application health, reliability, and support effectiveness.

10.  Previous experience leading or coordinating a production support team.

11.  Strong communication, stakeholder management, analytical, and problem-solving skills.

12.  Ability to balance day-to-day production support responsibilities with longer-term SRE transformation initiatives.