Application Support Engineer

Team Context

Every engineer at Aflac builds on what we ship. The Developer Experience (DevX) team in Aflac Northern Ireland exists to make software delivery faster, safer and simpler, so product teams can focus on solving problems for customers, employees and the sales organisation rather than working through delivery complexity. We're building a simpler, standard and measurable software delivery system, powered by AI and designed to help Aflac deliver more business value, more quickly.

Our job is to provide the shared capabilities that make good delivery repeatable: platforms, tooling, golden paths, automated controls, engineering standards and AI-aware knowledge, integrated at enterprise scale. In practice, that means a self-service portal for onboarding applications and components, secure-by-default pipelines, automated change-management checks, and integrations across our entire DevOps tooling estate. We treat it all as a product, with Aflac's engineers as our customers, and we build and run it in an AI-native way, with AI agents working alongside us from research and planning through to code, review and production support.

Role Context

When DevX has a bad day, every engineering team at Aflac feels it. Our code runs inside every Azure DevOps pipeline in the organisation through golden bricks and org-wide pipeline decorators, and our portal and services sit between engineers and the tools they rely on. A failed decorator, an expired credential or a stuck sync job can block releases across the business. This role exists to make sure that doesn't happen, and to get us back on our feet quickly when it does.

As an Application Support Engineer, you'll be the technical owner for the health of the DevX platform in production. You'll provide Level 2 and Level 3 support for the DevX portal, its services and integrations, golden path pipelines and decorators, and the DevOps tooling estate we help run, including GitHub, Azure DevOps and its build agents, SonarQube, Snyk and Cloudsmith. In line with our "Prevention is better than the Cure" approach, you won't just fix incidents. You'll find the root cause and put measures in place that stop them coming back.

You'll treat monitoring, alerting, runbooks and incident response as first-class engineering, not afterthoughts. You'll use AI agents as a force multiplier to triage faster, automate routine work and turn what you learn in production into knowledge the whole team can use. You'll also be a trusted partner to the engineers who use the platform, translating technical issues into plain language and bringing support insight back into the roadmap.

Key Responsibilities

Application Support

• Providing Level 2 and Level 3 support for the DevX platform and DevOps tooling estate, including triage, investigation and resolution of ServiceNow incidents and requests escalated from L1
• Operating in a core-hours support model from 9am to 5pm UK time, and taking part in an on-call rota for out-of-hours and weekend support
• Leading problem management and blameless post-incident reviews, and turning findings into lasting fixes
• Supporting teams onboarding applications and components to DevX, and resolving pipeline, golden brick and change-management issues they hit
• Working with internal teams, US colleagues and third-party vendors (GitHub, Microsoft, Snyk, SonarSource, Cloudsmith) to troubleshoot and resolve complex problems
• Feeding support trends back into the backlog so recurring issues get engineered out, not worked around

Reliability and Observability

• Defining and tracking service level objectives for the portal, interaction APIs, sync processes and pipeline decorators
• Building and maintaining monitoring, tracing, dashboards and alerting in Dynatrace and CloudWatch across services, scheduled jobs, external integrations and AWS infrastructure
• Monitoring the health of the platform's moving parts: EKS workloads, RDS PostgreSQL, Kubernetes CronJobs that sync DevX with Active Directory, Snyk, SonarQube and ServiceNow, and the build agent fleet
• Supporting safe rollout and rollback of platform changes, with particular care for changes that have org-wide blast radius such as decorators and golden bricks
• Owning operational readiness for upgrades and maintenance, including EKS node and AMI refreshes, RDS engine upgrades and certificate and credential rotation
• Supporting operational resilience and disaster recovery testing for the platform and its dependencies

Automation and AI-Native Operations

• Automating routine operational work, health checks and runbooks with scripts, pipelines and AI agents
• Building and improving the agent skills, steering and knowledge bases we use for production triage across Dynatrace, AWS, Azure DevOps and GitHub
• Capturing learnings from incidents in our knowledge base so the next engineer, human or AI, resolves the same issue faster
• Writing post-deployment checks and synthetic tests that catch problems before our users do

Operational Controls and Risk

• Keeping audit trails, deployment records and change-management evidence complete and usable for incident, risk and compliance review
• Working with Security on least-privilege access, secrets management, vulnerability remediation and identity integrations (Ping, Active Directory, CyberArk)
• Contributing to production readiness criteria, release planning and change management for the platform
• Ensuring compliance with enterprise standards and regulatory requirements

Skills and Experience

Below is an overview of the skills and experience we're looking for. If you don't have everything listed, don't rule yourself out. Your intellect, attitude and passion for keeping engineers productive matter most.

Essential

• Minimum of 4 years of experience in application support, site reliability engineering or DevOps
• Strong problem-solving and debugging skills across distributed systems, APIs and microservices
• Experience supporting containerised applications on AWS, ideally Kubernetes / Amazon EKS, along with services such as RDS, IAM and CloudWatch
• Experience with observability and monitoring tools such as Dynatrace or CloudWatch
• Experience in incident and problem management, including on-call support
• Hands-on CI/CD pipeline experience (Azure DevOps preferred) and an understanding of Infrastructure as Code and automated deployments
• Scripting skills in Python, Bash or similar
• Daily use of AI coding assistants or agents, or a strong drive to work that way, with the judgement to review and own what they produce
• High agency: you act like an owner, stay calm under pressure and see problems through to resolution
• Excellent communication skills, including the ability to engage with stakeholders locally and in the US
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering or a STEM subject (or comparable commercial experience)
• Candidates must be based in Northern Ireland with the relevant Right to Work visa

Highly Desirable

Experience in several of these areas is enough:

• Administering or supporting DevOps tooling at enterprise scale: GitHub, Azure DevOps (including self-hosted build agents), SonarQube, Snyk, Cloudsmith or JFrog
• Azure DevOps YAML templates, extensions and pipeline decorators
• Supporting Java / Spring Boot services and reading application logs and stack traces with confidence
• IaC with CloudFormation, CDK or Terraform, and tools such as eksctl and Helm
• PostgreSQL administration and troubleshooting
• Identity and access: OIDC/OAuth 2.0, Ping, Active Directory, CyberArk
• Defining SLOs, error budgets and capacity planning
• ServiceNow incident, problem and change management, along with Jira and Confluence
• AWS certification or equivalent

Emerging Technology Bonus Points

• Agentic AI for operations: MCP servers, agent skills and AI-assisted incident triage
• Policy-as-code with Open Policy Agent (Rego)
• Developer experience metrics and platform reliability measurement

What Makes This Role Exciting

Few support roles have this much reach. Keeping DevX healthy means keeping every engineering team at Aflac shipping, so a single alert, runbook or automated fix can save hundreds of engineers a bad day. You'll have the space to shape how we operate the platform while the decisions are still open, and you'll be at the front of AI-native operations, helping define practices the rest of the organisation adopts. There's also a clear path to grow from production support into platform and site reliability engineering.

Please note that this is not a remote role. You will be required to come into the Northern Ireland office two days per week. The role may require up to 10% travel, including travel connected to partner and stakeholder engagement.

We are committed to attracting diverse talent and supporting flexible working. Applications from candidates wishing to work four days per week are welcomed and will be considered in line with business and team requirements.

Thanks for reading this far. We'd love to hear from you if you want to join a technology innovation company with start-up agility and Fortune 500 stability, where AI-native engineering is already how we deliver and run our platform.

Aflac Northern Ireland is an equal opportunities employer.